Authenticity lends dignity to tale of loss, betrayal in Southie

Book Review

September 10, 2011|By Michael Patrick Brady

Broken Irish is Edward J. Delaneys second novel.

BROKEN IRISH By Edward J. Delaney

Turtle Point, 379 pp., $18.50

South Boston’s hardscrabble history and abundant local color make it fertile ground for fiction, but it’s often done a disservice by stories that rely on garish caricatures and lazy stereotypes. Thankfully, “Broken Irish,’’ the Southie-based second novel by local writer Edward J. Delaney, treats its strong ensemble of characters with dignity, even as they plunge headlong into tragedy.

Set on the cusp of the millennium, the novel depicts a community in upheaval. The institutions that bound the neighborhood together are crumbling, as is the siege mentality that long kept Southie an isolated, Irish enclave. Whitey Bulger is gone, but the emerging sexual abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese shows that the shepherds were, in some cases, no better than the wolves. “Southie,’’ according to one character, “was like a purgatory from which many could simply not escape.’’

Thirteen-year-old Christopher Coogan has a vague notion of escaping his claustrophobic surroundings, but to him even the Back Bay is a distant and forbidding realm; the Fort Point Channel may as well be a moat. Christopher is a quiet, sullen kid, deeply wounded by his father’s death in the Persian Gulf War and scarred by abuse at the hands of Father John, his parish priest. His mother Colleen is a basket case, so paralyzed by grief and uncertainty that she helplessly watches her son disengage from life, with nothing to offer him but wary silence. It’s only when she finds evidence that implicates Father John as the cause of Christopher’s turmoil that she becomes animated, desperately seeking to break the Catholic Church’s formidable code of silence. Left to his own devices, Christopher takes it upon himself to serve as protector to his 16-year-old crush, Jeanmarie, whose beauty and willful naïveté have left her vulnerable to exploitation by a shady fashion photographer.