By Trevor Butterworth

Published in The Washington Post's Book World
February 22, 2004

CALL ME THE BREEZE
By Patrick McCabe.

Welcome back to McCabe country, the stifling, vaporous border region between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland mined in McCabe's 1992 literary bombshell, The Butcher Boy, and in subsequent books. The year is 1976, and young Joey Tallon has begun a lifetime apprenticeship in non-achievement, pulling pints in the local bar. He is an innocent among the hard men and hucksters, unwittingly drawn into their conversational ambit, privy to their violent deeds and sexual intrigues. After work, he leaves the rotten spiritual core of Scotsfield to sleep in a ramshackle trailer on the edge of town, an abode normally associated with Ireland's de facto (but non-Romano) gypsies, known in the scabrous vernacular as "tinkers."

The symbolism is overt: Joey is an outsider in a country at war over the very idea of home.

Fueled by copious amounts of acid and dope, Herman Hesse, Charles Manson and Joni Mitchell, Joey dreams of escaping Scotsfield for Iowa -- largely because the word sounds magical -- and, more conventionally, California. In either place, Joey figures he will be able to start over and live out a more authentic life with the woman of his fantasies, Jacy, the California-blonde moll of the local Irish Republican Army capo.

In the meantime, Joey curls up with an inflatable plastic doll named Mona, an effigy of his runaway father's dead mistress, in whose womb he craves to be reborn. This kid clearly has issues, and his divided quest for rebirth eventually unites all the elements of his life, real and imagined, with disastrous consequences. Inspired by Travis Bickle's get-fit program of "Total Organization" from the movie "Taxi Driver," Joey tries to wean himself off drugs and an addiction to lard-encased kidney pies. Sporting a Mohawk haircut and an army jacket, he stages an audacious kidnapping during a peace rally, loses an eye to a judiciously stubbed-out spliff and winds up in prison.

If this sounds like heady stuff, be prepared for painfully slow exposition. McCabe lets Joey tell his story through reminiscence, diary entries, film scripts and other literary jottings. Not only does this mode of narration undermine much in the way of drama, it burdens the reader with the bloated egomania of a deluded, drug-addled naif. Unfortunately, these characteristics only deepen as a progressive prison governor encourages Joey to extend his literary interests into taking up writing as a way of decoding his past.

The second half of the book thus becomes a sort of meta-reminiscence on the events described in the first, circumscribed by Joey 's emergence as a full-blown holy fool in the temple of art. While this has undeniably comic moments -- his rant on the merits of Allen Ginsberg over Samuel Beckett is a cuss-filled howl -- Joey's rapid descent into lunatic posturing acquires the tedium of a vendetta.

Despite Joey's voracious passion for literature, McCabe baldly denies his protagonist all but the most cursory self-awareness. Shorn of insight and gifted with protean gullibility, Joey embarks on a series of crazed misadventures and becomes, in the process, a vehicle for polemical interests that are as various as they are undeveloped: attacks on rock star Bono, the authenticity of Irish art in an age of media celebrity and, most peculiarly, Miramax studio chief Harvey Weinstein.

The forced comedy of inescapable foolishness is impossible not to read as a betrayal of character, for Joey's predicament, conveyed though it is through oblique and unreliable testimony, is rendered, initially, with sufficient realism to be affective. Yet McCabe is remorseless in denying Joey redemption. Perhaps the inexorable logic of such dark humor is destruction for destruction's sake; but cruelty, in the absence of some cohesive point or theme, bears only the stamp of cynicism. Literature thus falls on the benighted working classes and lifts them up to nothing more than ridicule and folly. Joey Tallon becomes an inverted Stephen Dedalus -- and his story, bursting with possibility, leaves us gazing only in despair at a Portrait of the Artist as an Eejit.