Prodigal Daughter

An estranged mother and daughter recall their searches for freedom, for love, for each other.

THE LIGHT OF EVENING

By Edna O'Brien

Houghton Mifflin. 294 pp. $25

I first came across Edna O'Brien's work as a teenager when I happened by chance upon a slim though enticing paperback misplaced on a random library shelf. That Saturday afternoon, I found myself thoroughly immersed in the dark and passionate world of Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977), its overtures to the classic ballad enveloping a morose tale of murder.

While homicide is not necessarily par for the course in reading O'Brien's novels, she has sundered the human spirit in a myriad other ways over the span of her prolific career. She specializes in portraying the intensely coupled yet disjointed asymmetries of mother and daughter, husband and wife. In the midst of these unholy tangles lurk also the drunken, brutish father, wayward sons and married lovers. And then there's the over-bearing Church with its legion of faithful, ever ready to judge, torment and chasten her scandalous protagonists -- those naive or forceful women who seek to escape the rigors of social convention and rural constraint.

Eleanora, in O'Brien's latest novel, The Light of Evening , is a famous writer, estranged from her mother, Dilly, and from the Irish motherland, whose history, landscape and people she recreates in a contorted act of veneration, at once rebellious disregard and steadfast filial duty. As Dilly lays dying in a Dublin hospital bed, she remembers an earlier life in New York, a lost love and an awkward marriage, and she calls her prodigal daughter home to the family fold.

The novel moves from Dilly's first-person account of her youthful adventures to a collection of scenes from Eleanora's tempestuous life and, finally, to the damning revelations of Eleanora's journal. O'Brien includes within these narratives a number of letters, all of which reveal, to varying degrees, the absolute neediness and utter reproach that mars these characters' ability to connect with those they love. This sentiment is contained in Dilly's last, painful meeting with Eleanora as she "holds her in a tight, clumsy, angry, desperate, loving, farewelling embrace." In the background stands the decaying family home, Rusheen, and Dilly's failed attempt to change her will and pass on the estate to Eleanora.

Faulkner's pithy observation that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" cements the novel's thematic attachments of kinship and land, the tense confluence of past and present. Some critics lament a certain redundancy in O'Brien's endless rewriting of her autobiographical struggles, but I found that the oft-rehearsed sketches of her fictionalized experience -- the bitter demise of conjugal bliss, the demoralizing affairs, the liberating quest for artistic fulfillment -- capture everything that makes her previous work so satisfying, in its contrite, worldly prose and its refusal of easy redemption.

The deliciously absurd interlude of Eleanora's exchange with a London neighbor who bequeaths to her, and then abruptly retracts, the gift of a box containing a wig of once lustrous red hair is O'Brien at her luminous best: "That small transaction an instance of their small lives in their small houses and their small gardens, their hearts contracting day by day, visiting little malices on one another in lieu of their missed happiness."

Given the imaginative terrain of the immigrant's tale, one might presume that Dilly's expatriate episode in the 1920s and her return to Ireland would serve as the novel's major stimulus. Yet the opening sections are somehow sadly lacking. Composed of a series of short vignettes, these moments are flattened into stock tableaus, devoid of the prosaic depth one might attach, for example, to a figurative snapshot simply titled "Ellis Island." Such instances are, like the novel as a whole, imbued with pathos, but they lack the weighty meaning and forceful energy found in some of O'Brien's earlier books.

In this regard, The Light of Evening strains to find a compelling close. While O'Brien is well-versed in capturing the brutality of grief or ennui, the overly constructed attempt to shock the reader at the novel's end, to bring things full circle yet atone for the prologue's epic mode -- "Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers" -- simply doesn't ring true. For O'Brien, the real poetry lies in the silent gesture, what's not said, the failure of communion. ·

Louise Bernard is an assistant professor of English at Georgetown University.