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Summary
Summary
Roger Rosenblatt--the acclaimed, award-winning essayist, memoirist, and New York Times bestselling author of Making Toast, Kayak Morning, and Lapham Rising--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, Máire, 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. Máire 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--Inishmaan, 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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Rosenblatt (Making Toast) tackles memory loss with a fictional portrait of a septuagenarian poet whose "wonderful brain" is "ebbing a bit." Thomas Murphy jokes, drinks, sings oldies, and wonders what he'll be doing the rest of his life in a funny, touching narrative that begins and ends with the question, "Have I told you about this?" Born off the Irish coast on Inishmaan, population 160, Murph now resides on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He teaches writing to the homeless and enjoys being a grandfather, but remains at loose ends following his wife's death. Daughter Maire drags him to a doctor after he sets off fire alarms when he forgets eggs boiling on the stove. He cannot remember the term smoke detector, or his New York area code. He wisecracks his way through the medical examination, fooling no one. Afterward, a chance encounter at a bar leads Murph to an opportunity for a new beginning: there he finds Sarah, a blind woman, who provides a rare connection-someone he understands and someone who understands him. Murph's rambling monologue reveals discernment and feeling, as a favorite George Eliot quote puts it, especially in riffs on poetry, regret, cooking, and the upside of forgetting. Smart as a whip, dumb as a post, and frail as pebbles, forgetful Murph proves a memorable hero as he faces his last years as though he won't crash if he goes full tilt. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
An elderly poet delivers a chatty, comic monologue on sex, death, life, and getting the girl. Rosenblattadmired for his essays for Time and PBS Frontline and for his more recent memoirs such as Making Toast (2010)likes an occasional dip into fiction. His first venture, Lapham Rising (2006), centered on a half-mad misanthrope fighting McMansions on Long Island. His new book features a cranky/lovable widower awaiting the verdict of dementia tests. Like Tom Sawyer imagining his own funeral, Thomas Murphy envisions his own obit mentioning "his heavenly baritone voice and sea-blue eyes" and pegging him as "the celebrated poet, genius, cardsharp, pop singer, piano bar player, raconteur, bon vivant, and all-around good guy." The novel is all character, teetering on the verge of caricaturethe Irish-born Murph drinks and sings loudly, usually "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" His New York liberal bona fides are so airtight that he teaches creative writing to the homeless. He sat down, he tells us, for civil rights at a Woolworth's in the 1960s. Rosenblatt spools out this tale without chapters, just fragments that mimic a skittering mind. (The first and last sentences are "Have I told you about this?") No one else speaks, although the pages are thick with quotations. A plot is barely there,and wheezes with the appearance of a comely young blind woman who might take the old dude to bedshades of the Sidney Poitier-inflected moralism of "A Patch of Blue." The book is better rattling around in the mind of the old fellow, who conjures a vivid childhood on an island in the Irish Sea and writes drafts here of a couple of decent poems. All the while, readers are subjected to such pointedly "lovable" nonsense as "you never crash if you go full tilt" and a bushel full of puns. Here is Murph, going over his prize acceptance speech in the back of a taxi: "delighting in its wit and flow, its mixing of sincerity and self-effacement, the warming anecdote, the dip into a pun, the soar into high seriousness here and there, a splash of poetry, a flash of skin." A generous assessment of the novel itself. A colorful man nears his demise with a bit o' philosophizing and a song. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
SOME NOVELS DELIGHT their readers with an intricate and irresistible plot, in which pace and clues and the stumble of events offer an alluring puzzle. Others are wonderful at evoking a time, a place, an emotion. Still others are notable primarily for the way the author creates unforgettable characters - beings so real, so complex, so absorbing that you think about them long after you finish the book, and you cannot quite believe they will no longer be holding your attention, provoking that startled pang of understanding and fellow feeling. This last feat, the unforgettable character, is the prime virtue of Roger Rosenblatt's novel "Thomas Murphy," for the aging poet who gives the book its name - whiskey-soaked; cheerful; mourning his late beloved wife, Oona; haunted by his bleak Irish childhood; best friends with his 4-year-old grandson, William - is the novel. He narrates it, he drives the ephemeral plot, he philosophizes and ruminates and remembers, he occasionally scrawls a poem. He is slowly losing his memory; he may soon be evicted from his vast rent-controlled New York City apartment; he is lured into another man's whopping lie, which leads, perhaps, just maybe, to new love; and that, essentially, describes the entire are of the narrative. But Rosenblatt's accomplishment is to draw the reader so completely into Murphy's mind and heart and memory, so thoroughly into the poet's amused (and sometimes bemused) consciousness, that the minimal plot and even less action are rarely cause for complaint. Within the first few pages we are all ears for Murph's stories and memories - the hard first years on a wet, cold, rocky island off Galway ("I hated the place, but I didn't want to lose anything about it"); the years since in Manhattan with Oona and their daughter, Maire; tales of his close friend Greenberg, murdered by a madman not long before; and then, soon after the book begins, a conspiracy that starts in a bar when a "square-shouldered bruiser twice my size and half my age" tells Murph he needs a poet for a certain subtle but crucial task. Murphy (or Rosenblatt) does get windy sometimes, and there are philosophical passages that may tempt you to turn the page hunting for meatier fare, but more often the writing soars and you are grateful for the fine writer who puts poetry in Murphy's mouth: "A saw's wheezing through a plank of pine. ... The blunt smell of dung and oil lamps. ... A cloud of lambs. The poise of an egret. The bent teeth of a harrow." And even more for Murph's honesty and shy courage. "I see the world," he says, "as equally beautiful and ridiculous- Absurd. No? But lovely too, and touching. And that, boyo, is life for you, is it not? A serious joke?" In a less cynical age we would call "Thomas Murphy" a life-affirming story, for despite the hero's fading memory, the loom of mortality, the death of those he loves, the myriad aches and embarrassments of old age, Murph's wit and verve are unquenchable, and he is as ready for new love at the end of his tale as any spry young soul is at the start of his or hers: "So live," says this irrepressible Irishman toward the close. "More noisily than ever. Court life. ... Sing it a love song. Belt it out at the top of your lungs." It is a fitting message for a book in which he has done just that throughout. BRIAN DOYLE is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon. His fifth novel, "Chicago," will be published in March.
