OH, PLAY THAT THING
By Roddy Doyle
Viking. 378 pp. $24.95
How could the author of so spirited a novel as A Star Called Henry write a sequel as lame as Oh, Play That Thing?
All I can figure is that it's one of those cases where a writer's imagination deserts him when he lights out for new territory. The earlier novel was set during the Irish Rebellion, and its headlong, rushing narrative seemed to just pour from Doyle with poetic urgency. In the Jazz-age America of this follow-up, he thrashes around without purpose, inspiration or -- despite a profusion of dumb jokes and set-ups -- wit. He's out of his element, and it shows.
In A Star Called Henry -- a most auspicious start to this projected trilogy -- Doyle crafted a marvelously mythic figure in Henry Smart: a child of the Dublin slums who shoots, steals and fornicates his way across early 20th-century Ireland, soaking up all the wild, restless energy of a country undergoing a violent rebirth.
The son of a listless mom and a dad who made a name for himself as the violent one-legged bouncer at a local brothel, Henry takes to the streets early. Armed only with the survival instincts he inherited from his father and the wooden leg he used to crack heads, Henry grows up to become a good-looking Lothario and a remorseless killer for the Irish Republican Army.
Along with his eventual wife and co-conspirator -- a former schoolteacher he knows only as Miss O'Shea, aka "Our Lady of the Machine Gun" -- Henry travels the countryside by bicycle, picking off "peelers" (cops) and suspected spies, a wily tough who thinks he's the master of his own fate. Actually, he's just a pawn in a larger game, and he becomes a marked man when a power struggle breaks out within the IRA ranks. Henry escapes to America, leaving behind Miss O'Shea and their infant daughter, Saoirse, trusting fate to one day reunite his family.
Fate kicks in all right in the new book: Lucky for him, Henry arrives in a country where not only can anything happen, but moronic plot turns grow on trees.
Arriving on Ellis Island in 1924, Henry finds work as a sandwich-board walker and bootleg-whiskey runner. With the missis stuck in Ireland, Henry's latest chippie is Fast Olaf's half-sister, who, besides being the near sibling of a low-level mobster, is something of a philosophical hedonist. After Henry runs afoul of the mob and Fast Olaf's half-sister saves his neck, the two run off to upstate New York, where they try to scam the locals by passing her off as a palm-reader and him as a dentist. When Henry finds out that one of his more unfortunate patients has New York mob connections, he's on the run again, this time to Chicago.
Henry falls under the spell of the hot new music pouring from all the clubs and meets a young genius with a horn named Louis Armstrong. The two have a lot in common; both are outsiders, ladies' men, perpetually broke and born improvisers. Henry becomes Louis's protector, manager and No. 1 fan, and their friendship feels real, as does Doyle's love (by way of Henry) for the music: "He was puppet and master, god and disciple, a one-man band in perfect step with the other players surrounding him. His lips were bleeding -- I saw drops fall like notes to his patent leather shoes -- but he was the happiest man on earth."
Doyle's own improv solos, unfortunately, would shame a first-year writing student. When Henry and Louis, both desperate for cash, decide to break into a house, they step into the one home in all of Chicago where Miss O'Shea is working as a live-in maid. Quicker than you can say "Doesn't Doyle have an editor?" the book slips into freefall. After Henry and Louis are lured to New York with the false promise of work on Broadway, Fast Olaf's half-sister reappears as Sister Flow, a kind of pagan Aimee Semple McPherson who preaches a gospel of instant gratification. Doyle tries to weave two plot threads together by having Sister Flow and Louis record a song together called "Don't Look in the Good Book" -- a huge hit, we're told, though you'd never guess it from Doyle's lyrics.
These events and most of what follows are supposed to be comic, zany or energetic, but there's more than a hint of desperation to the proceedings. As Henry regains his family, loses them and wanders across the landscape, you can almost smell the flop-sweat as Doyle struggles to find an exit. Everything feels forced, whether it's Henry and Miss O'Shea's tiresome rebel passion for each other or Henry's sudden rediscovery of his dad's leg, after spending a whole book without it.
There's another book to go in the Henry series, and Doyle suggests that his Irish picaro will ride out the rest of the Great Depression in Hollywood. Perhaps by then Doyle will have relearned to play his own thing with more subtlety and craft. •
Rodney Welch frequently reviews books for the Columbia, S.C., Free-Times.
