The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction
with this reflective, bittersweet tale that introduces the irrepressible
aging poet Thomas Murphy--a paean to the mystery, tragedy, and wonder of
life.
Trying his best to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist his
only child, Maire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphy--singer
of the oldies, friend of the down-and-out, card sharp, raconteur, piano
bar player, bon vivant, tough and honest and all-around good
guy--contemplates his sunset years. Maire worries that Murph is losing
his memory. Murph wonders what to do with the rest of his life. The
older mind is at issue, and Murph's jumps from fact to memory to fancy,
conjuring the islands that have shaped him--Irishmaan, a rocky gumdrop
off the Irish coast where he was born, and New York, his longtime home.
He muses on the living, his daughter and precocious grandson William,
and on the dead, his dear wife Oona, and Greenberg, his best friend.
Now, into Murphy's world comes the lovely Sarah, a blind woman less than
half his age, who sees into his heart, as he sees into hers. Brought
together under the most unlikely circumstance, Murph and Sarah begin in
friendship and wind up in impossible possible love.
An Irishman, a dreamer, a poet, Murph, like Whitman, sings lustily of
himself and of everyone. Through his often extravagant behavior and
observations, both hilarious and profound, we see the world in all its
strange glory, equally beautiful and ridiculous. With memory at the
center of his thoughts, he contemplates its power and accuracy and
meaning. Our life begins in dreams, but does not stay with them, Murph
reminds us. What use shall we make of the past? Ultimately, he asks, are
relationships our noblest reason for living?
Behold the charming, wistful, vibrant, aging Thomas Murphy, whose story
celebrates the ageless confusion that is this dreadful, gorgeous life.
