Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION DOY | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION DOY | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The sequel to Roddy Doyle's beloved novel A Star Called Henry - an entertaining romp across America in the 1920s. Fleeing the Irish Republican paymasters for whom he committed murder and mayhem, Henry Smart has left his wife and infant daughter in Dublin and is off to start a new life. When he lands in America, it is 1924 and New York City is the center of the universe. Henry turns to hawking cheap hooch on the Lower East Side, only to catch the attention of the mobsters who run the district. In Chicago, Henry finds a newer America alive with wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. But in a city also owned by the mob, Armstrong is a prisoner of his color. He needs a man--a white man--and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.
Author Notes
Roddy Doyle is the author of five previous novels, including a Booker Prize nominee, The Van, and a Booker Prize winning international bestseller Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He has also written several screenplays, most recently When Brendan Met Trudy. His first children's book, The Giggler Treatment, will be published in September by Scholastic. He lives in Dublin.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Doyle stumbles somewhat in this sequel to his excellent 1999 bestseller, A Star Called Henry. Beginning with Irish revolutionary Henry Smart's arrival in New York City in 1924, the story follows Henry's subsequent adventures in advertising, bootlegging, pornography, unlicensed dentistry and keeping ahead of the former associates who'd like to see him eat a lead sandwich. After encroaching too much on a mobster's turf-and getting lucky with another powerful fellow's kept lady-Henry hightails it to Chicago, where he becomes the unofficial manager of a young Louis Armstrong. Though serendipitously reunited with his beloved wife and the daughter he's never met while trying to rob her employer's house, Henry soon heads back to New York to help Louis make it big. While just as brash and lively as Doyle's earlier novels, this one isn't nearly as focused; the dialogue-heavy narrative is interspersed with shifts in setting, time and plot, and characters appear and disappear with little consequence, their spoken parts hasty, repetitive and often perplexing. Worse, Doyle takes Henry Smart's charm for granted; readers unfamiliar with his previous adventures may roll their eyes at his arrogance and incessant sexual encounters. There's just too much material; any of the novel's numerous strands could have been fleshed out into its own book. That said, the novel is still a lot of improbable fun. Agent, John Sutton. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Times may be tough in 1920s New York, but for ex-IRA assassin Henry Smart, Ellis Island seems like heaven on earth. In this ebullient continuation of the epic that began with the 2000 best-seller A Star Called Henry, Dublin-born Smart leaves behind his loving wife (whom he still calls Miss O'Shea) and infant daughter to start life anew. Donning a pearl gray fedora and a snappy suit, Henry finds a job as a sandwich-board ad man and complements his earnings by selling the bootleg liquor tucked inside the placards. As he mingles with gangsters and dolls, Henry keeps a watchful eye out for the hard men who know about the death warrant issued for him on the other side of the Atlantic. When his overly enterprising ways enrage his superiors, Henry flees to Chicago, where he embraces the emerging jazz scene and becomes trumpeter Louis Armstrong's right-hand man. In an era when skin color dictates status, Smart's responsibilities are clear: My purpose was my whiteness, and my willingness to walk it beside Louis. The two return to Harlem, where the soaring music scene makes Smart's heart sing. But the past forever haunts Henry, who holds out hope for a reunion with true love O'Shea. Booker Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Doyle displays his trademark sensitivity and wit in a tale full of adventure, passion, and prose as punchy as a Satchmo riff. --Allison Block Copyright 2004 Booklist
Guardian Review
Even the leanest of writers sometimes have a fat novel inside them fighting to get out. In Ireland, writers don't come much leaner than Roddy Doyle, who inherits the niggardly style of Samuel Beckett rather than the lavish manner of James Joyce. With his laconic Dublin-Northside realism, Doyle is a virtuoso of the sentence that travels no further than four or five words. But the fat novel inside him has now come bursting through - two of them, in fact, of which the first was A Star Called Henry , and the second is this fast- moving sequel. In its mixture of history and magic realism, A Star Called Henry reflected the rise and fall of the Irish revolution of independence in the fortunes of its picaresque protagonist, Henry Smart. At the end of the book, Henry is a Republican killer on the run; at the start of Oh, Play That Thing , he washes up where a lot of good Irishmen and women go before they die, the United States. This novel, in other words, begins with that most revered of all Irish customs, getting out of the place as soon as you can. The Irish write about history as habitually as the English write about suburbia. For one thing, there is a lot of it about in Ireland, much of it of the turbulent kind, which lends itself to gripping fic tion. For another thing, there is an Irish literary tradition of using individual characters to represent a wider history, a tactic which makes sense in a country where the private/ public divide has always been less emphatic than it is across the water. It's true that many of the Irish these days relate to their history by the simple device of disowning it. A Star Called Henry is savagely disenchanted with nationalist politics, as nations usually are once the revolutions that brought them to power are safely behind them. Once the gunfire has died down, the trick is to forget about these embarrassing origins, which are scarcely good for business and social order, and rubbish the heroics you previously celebrated. This is known as revisionism, without a discreet dose of which you won't get an academic job teaching Irish history. Irish nostalgia has often been interwoven with a ferocious hunger for the modern, and one name for modernity in Ireland is America. Dublin is a lot closer to Detroit than it is to Harrogate. Oh, Play That Thing , like Frank McCourt's 'Tis , belongs among other things to an Irish love affair with the New World. In fact, one of the deepest divisions between the Irish and the English is that the Irish, for obvious historical reasons, are deeply fond of the Americans, whereas the English, for equally historical reasons, are not. For a cramped, clerical, down- at-heel country, the US means affluence, space, self-invention. Manhattan is a lot more exciting than the Giant's Causeway, and this narrative positively crackles with these transatlantic energies. At the start of the story, Henry Smart has landed on New York's Ellis Island, where intending immigrants have letters chalked on their shoulder by officials: L for weak lungs, J for too Jewish, X for mental, SE for too far south and east of Budapest and so on. Triumphantly eluding all these categories, Henry gets his start in the Land of the Free as a small-time literary type, otherwise known as a sandwich-board man. This recalls the greatest of all Irish small-time literary men, Ulysses 's Leopold Bloom. Chased out of New York by the Mob, Smart packs meat in the Chicago stockyards and falls in, a touch implausibly, with Louis Armstrong. Louis hires Henry to lend him some white cover and credibility, and the two of them go off on the odd burgling spree when times are hard. The coupling of Black and Irish is a classic one. Henry knows he has become an American when "black and tan" suggests to him not a bunch of British military thugs in Ireland but a racially mixed New York night club. But the past, as usual with the Gothic-minded Irish, refuses to lie down, and by the end of the novel the hero (now minus one leg and plus one baby tenderly known as Rifle) is still being pursued by the ghosts of his IRA past. A third and final novel is to follow. Despite its capaciousnes, Oh, Play That Thing isn't really a break with Doyle's earlier minimalism. What it does instead is convert the lippy idiom of the Dublin working class into the quippy one-liners of the American underworld. "The pants weren't invented to hide my happiness," reminisces one former lover. Dublin sarcasm becomes New York smartassery. Doyle wonderfully recreates a world of flophouses and speakeasies, flappers and bootleggers, populated by characters with names like Johnny No and Jimmy the Priest and reeking of multi-ethnic odours. It's all a bit too Chandleresque and relentlessly hardboiled, with little of the suggestive symbolic depths of A Star Called Henry ; but what it lacks in human thickness it makes up for in pace and drama. But in the end, the novel is too starry-eyed rather than too streetwise. Its hardbitten realism can't conceal a very Irish romanticising of the American outlaw and spiritual hobo. The alienated Dubliner becomes the footloose adventurer riding the railroads. American on-the-roadery is just the flipside of Irish claustrophobia. Henry Smart is the eternal emigre, a loner even in his own country, who is nothing like as admirable as his author seems to imagine. And not only because he is a murderer . . . Terry Eagleton's latest book is After Theory (Allen Lane) . To order Oh, Play that Thing for pounds 14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-doyle.1 In its mixture of history and magic realism, A Star Called [Henry Smart] reflected the rise and fall of the Irish revolution of independence in the fortunes of its picaresque protagonist, Henry Smart. At the end of the book, Henry is a Republican killer on the run; at the start of Oh, Play That Thing , he washes up where a lot of good Irishmen and women go before they die, the United States. This novel, in other words, begins with that most revered of all Irish customs, getting out of the place as soon as you can. At the start of the story, Henry Smart has landed on New York's Ellis Island, where intending immigrants have letters chalked on their shoulder by officials: L for weak lungs, J for too Jewish, X for mental, SE for too far south and east of Budapest and so on. Triumphantly eluding all these categories, Henry gets his start in the Land of the Free as a small-time literary type, otherwise known as a sandwich-board man. This recalls the greatest of all Irish small-time literary men, Ulysses 's Leopold Bloom. Chased out of New York by the Mob, Smart packs meat in the Chicago stockyards and falls in, a touch implausibly, with Louis Armstrong. Louis hires Henry to lend him some white cover and credibility, and the two of them go off on the odd burgling spree when times are hard. The coupling of Black and Irish is a classic one. - Terry Eagleton.
Kirkus Review
Terrorist Henry Smart, the memorable IRA antihero of Doyle's superb sixth novel (A Star Called Henry, 1999) makes an imperfect conquest of America in this widely ranging sequel. We pick up Henry's story in 1924, after his arrival in New York City (just ahead of gunmen assigned to kill him) and entry into the criminal underclass as an "advertising" impresario employing sandwich-board bearers. Still pining for the wife left behind, whom he knew only as "Miss O'Shea" (she having been his teacher), Henry--a strapping 23-year-old few women can resist--finds substitutes, and reasons to head west after he has infringed on mobster Louis Lepke's turf and pleasured himself with the mistress of Hibernian-immigrant bootlegger Owney Madden. In Chicago, Henry discovers the "furious, happy and lethal" newly popular music called jazz, and bonds--rather unbelievably--with the young Louis Armstrong, who makes Henry (amusingly addressed as "O'Pops") his de facto "white manager." If you think this is beginning to sound like Forrest Gump, read on. Briefly and improbably reunited with Miss O'Shea and the daughter (Saoirse) he's never seen, Henry follows the embattled (and unemployable) Armstrong to Harlem, meets gangster-nightclub owner Dutch Schultz, and reconnects with a resourceful whore who has reinvented herself as "Sister Flo" (an evangelist of the Aimee Semple McPherson variety), soon thereafter leaving Louis's employ and moving on to LA. Surviving an encounter with a Dublin hit man, Henry rides the rails during the Depression years, loses a leg along with his family (one more time, as jazzmen say), and ends up in California in 1946, schmoozing with filmmaker John Ford, who vows his next movie will tell "the real Irish story": i.e., Henry's. A surprising amount of this nonsense is quite absorbing, because Booker-winner Doyle is too lively and skilled a novelist to let it be otherwise. But Oh, Play That Thing is fatally overstuffed and chaotic. An uncharacteristic misstep in a brilliant writer's estimable career. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
A Star Called Henry returns, remaking himself as a bon vivant American. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I could bury myself in New York. I could see that from the boat as it went under the Statue of Liberty on a cold dawn that grew quickly behind me and shoved the fog off the slate-coloured water. That was Manhattan, already towering over me. It made tiny things of the people around me, all gawking at the manmade cliffs, and the ranks of even higher cliffs behind them, stretching forever into America and stopping their entry. I could see the terror in their eyes. I could stare into the eyes without fear of recognition. They weren't Irish faces and it wasn't Irish muck on the hems of their greatcoats. Those coats had been dragged across Europe. They were families, three and four generations of them; the Irish travelled alone. There were the ancient women, their faces collapsed and vicious, clutching bags they'd carried across the continent, full of string and eggshells and stones from the walls of lost houses. And their husbands behind them, hidden by beards, their eyes still young and fighting. They guarded the cases and boxes at their feet. And their sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, under embroidered scarves and black caps, and younger children still, and pregnant girls with scrawny boys standing and sitting beside them, all cowed by the approaching city cliffs. Even the youngest sensed that their excitement was unwanted and stayed silent, as the Reliance sent small waves against Bedloe's Island and the big stone American woman - send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me - as their parents and grandparents shivered at the new world and tried to know if they were looking at its front or back. I was the only man alone, the only man not afraid of what was growing up in front of us. This was where a man could disappear, could die if he wanted to, and come back to quick, big life. I had arrived. But we turned from Manhattan and sailed, almost back into the night, towards the New Jersey shore. And the silence around me fell deeper as the island crept up in front of us. The last few square feet of the old, cruel world, the same name in all the languages on board as we were pulled closer and closer, isola delle lagrime , Tränen Insel , the isle of tears. Ellis Island. Hundreds of shuffling feet trapped under the vaulted ceiling of the great hall, the air was full of the whispers of the millions who'd passed through, the cries of the thousands who'd been stopped and sent back. I listened for the tap of a famous leg, but I heard none. Old men tried to straighten long-crooked backs and mothers rubbed rough colour into the white cheeks of their children. Wild men ran fingers through long beards and regretted that they hadn't shaved before they'd disembarked. Jewish women caressed sons' ringlets and tried to push them under hats. Fragments of new language were tried, and passed from mouth to mouth. --Yes, sir. --No, sir. --My cousin, he have a house. --I am a farmer. --Qu-eeeens. The medical inspector stared into my eyes. I knew what he was looking for. I'd been told all about it, by a lame and wheezy anarchist who was making his seventh try at landing. --They see the limp but never the brain, he'd said. --The fools. When they confront the fact that I am too dangerous for their country, then I will happily turn my back on it. But, until then, I commute between Southampton and their Ellis Island. --If you could afford first or second class, I told him, --you wouldn't have to set foot on the island. --You think I am not aware of this? he said. --I can afford it. But I won't afford it. The inspector was looking for signs of trachoma in my eyes, and for madness behind them. He couldn't stare for long - no one could; he saw nothing that was going to send me back. To my left, another inspector drew a large L on a shoulder with a brand new piece of chalk. L was for lung. I knew the signs; I'd been seeing them all my life. The man with the brand new L had already given up. He collapsed and coughed out most of his remaining life. He had to be carried away. An E on the shoulder meant bad eyes, another L meant lameness. And behind those letters, other hidden letters, never chalked onto shoulders: J for too Jewish, C for Chinese, SE, too far south and east of Budapest. H was for heart, SC was for scalp, X was for mental. And H was for handsome. The guards stood back and I walked the few steps to the next desk. I let my heels clip the Spanish tiles. Two beautiful sisters held each other as they were pushed back. Without parents or children they were too likely to fall into bad hands waiting for them on the Manhattan or New Jersey wharfs. If they were lucky they'd be kept on the island until relatives were found to take them; less lucky, they'd be pawed, then let through; less lucky still, they'd be deported, sent back before they'd arrived. I handed my passport and papers to the Immigration Bureau officer. He opened the passport and found the ten-dollar note I'd left in its centre. The note was gone before I saw it missing. I'd taken it from the wheezy anarchist; its loss didn't sting. Then came the catechism, the questions I couldn't get wrong. --What is your name? --Henry Drake. --Where are you from? --London. --Why have you come to the United States? --Opportunity. So far, so easy. But he stopped. He looked at me. --Where are you travelling from, sir? he asked me. It wasn't one of the questions. --London, I said. He seemed to be staring at the word as I spoke it. --You are a born Englishman, sir? He read my latest name. --Mister Drake? --Yes. --Henry Drake. --Yes. --And where is Missis Drake, sir? --She's in my dreams. --So you're travelling alone, sir, is that right? You are an unmarried man. --That's right. --And how do you intend supporting yourself, sir? We were back on track. --By working very hard. --Yes, and how, sir? --I'm a salesman. --And your speciality? I shrugged. --Everything, and anything. --Alright. And do you have sufficient funds to sustain you until you commence selling everything? --I do. He handed me a sheet of paper. --Could you read this for me, sir? --We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union-- And as I strolled through the literacy test, I could feel Victor, my brother, beside me, his leg pressed against mine in the school desk, and Miss O'Shea at my shoulder, my teacher and wife, the mother of the daughter I suddenly missed, her wet fingers on my cheek. --and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of-- He took the paper from my fingers. He picked up a rubber stamp and brought it down on top of a card. I read the stamp: ADMITTED. --Welcome to America, he said. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Oh, Play That Thing by Roddy Doyle All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
