Whatever its faults, I was sorry it ended: Jim the Boy

Jim the Boy, a novel by Tony Earley, Little Brown (2001).

I enjoyed reading this novel, and came to feel that the young boy, Jim, his bachelor uncles Zeno, Coran, Al, and his mother Elizabeth were people I knew. Earley writes in a plainspoken, intimate manner that is just right for the characters of this rural town in North Carolina in the 1930s. Throughout the book, Jim the boy's father, who died just before Jim the boy was born, is a ghostly presence. The boy yearns to know him, to hear stories about him. To be like him. His widowed mother is courted by a man that her brother Zeno (the head of the family) approves of, and yet she cannot stop her by now morbid devotion to her dead husband. Jim the boy's search for his father ties the different chapters and stories, and small town events together. There are a number of small narratives that intersect, including Jim's awkward friendship with Penn, a boy who is both his best friend and his strongest competitor (though the character of Penn seems a little unfilled).

I sometimes felt the sentiment in the work put a kind of sentimental haze over the characters. The uncles and Jim's mother are so lovingly depicted, they seem a little too saintly. But their mishaps and pain are real enough. Earley's plain style helps prevent the sentiment from overwhelming the stories and characters. Whatever its faults, I was sorry the book ended.

Dancing at Lughnesa -- something truly lived

Dancing at Lughnesa, a play by Brian Friel. We saw the Sunday afternoon performance at Wellesley Summer Theater, June 2, 2013. Directed by Nora Hussey and Marta Rainer.

From the description that I read in the Globe, I expected a sad dark play. Five adult sisters living together on a remote farm in Ireland in 1936. Their frail elder brother returns from his missionary work in Africa after many years, his mind wandering and perhaps broken. And the sisters' lives get worse, as the oldest sisters loses her job as a teacher, and two of the younger ones lose their piece-work knitting jobs.

Whoah. But it's darker and more sorrowful than that. The play is narrated by the adult Michael, the son of one of the sisters, many years later as he reminisces about that summer of 1936, when uncle returned from Africa. The very device of reminiscence in a play, of knowing that the people depicted are long dead, of course pulls us into a sad, doomed world.  I liked it a lot.

The slight bits of humor delighted us, as did the dancing and the loud brash sisters. They were all wonderful performances by the cast. I felt heartsick at the end, and wished that some of the sadness and sentiment had not hit us so hard, yet I felt that I had seen something truly lived. And I wouldn't change it.