Word: owney
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...Owney Morrison is descended from a long line of drinkers. He likes beer for breakfast and whiskey and beer chasers at lunch. "Just one" after work frequently turns into one too many. Sometimes Owney sleeps it off overnight in the hog house, the dressing room at the construction site. This does not please his wife Dolores, who wants to study medicine but is stuck at home with a baby. Dolores is a latter-day stereotype and one that Breslin is less sure of than he is of the guys and dolls along Queens Boulevard. Still, she is vital and feisty...
There are two kinds of courage in Table Money. Owney's is physical, as he displayed in Viet Nam by winning a Congressional Medal of Honor. Dolores proves her valor by overcoming generations of inertia and fatalism. She does it by demonstrating that behind the male swagger there is usually an unsteady little boy in need of a firm maternal hand. When a neighborhood Rambo threatens to shoot at police from his window, Dolores arms herself with a basket of wet wash and gets him to help her hang it: "She held her hand out and Ralphie gave...
...work sandhogging for 75¢ a day plus three hots and a cot. He soon discovers that he is restricted to the construction camp because the nearby Hudson River town of Beacon, N.Y., does not want muddy foreigners on its streets. Later Morrisons dig water tunnels in the Bronx. Owney's granduncle Jack stays above ground to work as a messenger for an influential Irish lawyer. One of Jack's jobs is to deliver expense money to William Butler Yeats, then staying at the attorney's (would you believe?) 30-room Manhattan apartment. Jack has sticky fingers; he usually lightens...
Breslin sets most of his action in the early '70s, after Owney returns from Viet Nam. His war experiences are locked inside him, and he has thrown away the key. He is literally and figuratively an underground man, emotionally detached from his family but bound by code and tradition to his brother sandhogs...
...tens of thousands with the same fervor as he filched a newspaper from a candy store," or Charlie O'Sullivan, an ex-baseball player and contract killer who swings a deadly bat. That these and other characters do not have much to do with the story of Dolores and Owney is not so noticeable as one might imagine. Breslin puts a lot of life on the page. Like a good barroom storyteller, he can make you miss your bus with one more for the road. --By R.Z. Sheppard