St. Patrick’s Day: Another Day in Dublin by Thomas McGonigle

Abstract

Reviewed by: St. Patrick’s Day: Another Day in Dublin by Thomas McGonigle Grant Matthew Jenkins (bio) ST. PATRICK’S DAY: ANOTHER DAY IN DUBLIN, by Thomas McGonigle. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. 234 pp. $27.00. Readers of Joyce can find much to like in St. Patrick’s Day: Another Day in Dublin, a 2017 novel by the Irish-American writer Thomas McGonigle: it spans approximately twenty-four hours in the life of its protagonist, Thomas McGonigle; it is written in a stream of consciousness, self-referential, and fragmentary form; and it takes place [End Page 493] in key locations in Dublin (mostly pubs). It also deals with the larger issues of memory and loss, nationalism and identity, and language and meaning that so motivate Ulysses, the modernist masterpiece whose shadow hangs heavily over McGonigle (hence the subtitle). I am not sure, however, whether I like the book because of these ties to Joyce or because I have a special place in my heart for pub crawls in famous literary Dublin pubs like Grogan’s and Mulligan’s. I did, however, enjoy reading it. The novel’s plot is essentially an expansion not just of Ulysses but of the classic Irish poem by Patrick Kavanagh (who plays a pivotal role as a deceased character in the text) turned into the lovely ballad, “On Raglan Road.”1 At the end of an underwhelming and rained-out St. Patrick’s Day parade, our narrator sets out from his hotel on an epic quest for the memory of an old love, as in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, that was too casually and regrettably thrown away.2 In the song, the memory of the girl on Grafton Street haunts the bard: On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking nowAway from me so hurriedly my reason must allowThat I had wooed not as I should. . . . (186) While the setting of the plot remains in Dublin’s pubs, the novel’s time slides indistinguishably from the present—sometime in the late 1980s—to the narrator’s past—including the time he was a student in Dublin, a part of the literary and politically troubled scene of the 1960s, and a child in Patchogue, New York. During each of the temporal layers, the narrator gives us glimpses of key moments in the rise and fall of his relationship with the love of his life, one from whom he had walked away. Mixed in with these memories of awkwardness, pain, and imagined ecstasy are musings on Irish culture and history, particularly the literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The text feels like a roman à clef to some extent, for the characters whom the narrator encounters are Irish writers and artists who inhabit, or inhabited, the same haunts as he did back in his (and their) more youthful days. Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, who also wrote a blurb on the back of the book, is clearly referenced in the McDaid’s bar section of the novel (92). The main refrain of the book is that conversations are useless and “everything is a mistake” (118). The discussions between characters, however, are sharp and usually incomplete, as they weave in and out of their days and nights of drinking: “Conversations belong on the stage. We’re in a bar and I’m having a conversation. It wasn’t planned this way. I would have preferred to have myself walk through this whole mess, silent and gazing” (100). Overall, I found the novel engaging. The main character grew [End Page 494] on me with his frank observations and almost lovable nostalgia. McGonigle the protagonist (and McGonigle the author) works very hard to drain the narrative journey of any sentimentality, and the sober—an ironic adjective to use of a novel in which the narrator drinks an impossible and practically uncountable dozens of pints of beer—perspective on the past is one of the strengths of the novel. It contains no stereotypes or clichés that you might expect from a work titled St. Patrick’s Day and all of the American dross that goes with that pseudo...