Word: shea
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True to his words, Dutch Shea, Jr. focuses on several provocative characters entangled in a malevolent fate. The Travel's namesake, an assimilated Irish Catholic detective, finds himself constantly having to defend arsonists and murderers, partially because his lather, also a lawyer, committed suicide after being convicted of a white-collar crime. Slowly sinking in a quagmire of guilt and despair. She a still finds time to draw some colorful characters into his world...
This tainted, conscience-stricken lawyer has seen lowlife from all angles, including a closeup in his bathroom mirror. When not obsessively recycling his own transgressions and those who have transgressed against him, Shea locks vividly onto the burglars, prostitutes, pimps, arsonists and killers who have crossed his path...
...traffic is heavy, the air polluted. No detail is too gross and no conversation too crude to be recorded. It is as if Shea's residual pride and growing self-hatred prevent him from putting euphemisms between himself and his experience. Raw sin is like a dose of salts, evil is a flail for self-punishment, and the law smells of deals, not ideals. Even his Roman Catholic soul can cop a plea: "He had his script worked out. Confession on his deathbed. Penance. Extreme unction. Two sacraments for the price of one. A perfect act of contrition...
...Dutch Shea Jr. get to be such a burnt-out case? There is the immediate anguish caused by the death of his adopted daughter Catherine. "Cat" was dismembered by an I.R.A. bomb in a London restaurant. Shea also fears the impending blast of an audit. He has misused funds from estates he was supposed to oversee. Fear and shame are magnified because his father was a lawyer who hanged himself in prison, where he was serving time for embezzlement...
Dunne turns some good Irish shtik. There are scatological scenes that Richard Pryor might envy. But too often the shocks and surprises are only gratuitous. An introductory note informs the reader that the settings for Shea's recollections are the two cities where the author spent much of his life. That would be Hartford and Los Angeles, though neither is identified. Instead, Dunne maps the geography inside Dutch Shea's head. It is a wasteland of appalling dimensions...