Read Me, I'm Irish

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In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, Mark Salter takes a literary tour of Ireland and wonders why some of the greatest and most vital Irish novelists are unknown in America.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of listening to a lengthy recorded interview with the Irish novelist, Roddy Doyle. Doyle’s books rely heavily on dialogue to reveal the interior and exterior lives of his characters;, dialogue that is as disarmingly rowdy and chaotic as his character’s lives and yet subtly illuminating, sharp-witted, and insistently and darkly funny. This probably explains why several of his novels have been successfully adapted as screenplays that retain more of the book’s essence and allure than do most adaptations for the screen.

Roddy once explained, “The problem with being Irish... is having Riverdance on your back. It’s a burden at times.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Doyle the conversationalist is as captivating as Doyle the writer. Discussing with his interviewer, Don McKellar, how artists from Ireland are popularly perceived outside their country, he explained “the problem with being Irish... is having Riverdance on your back. It’s a burden at times.”

I thought about that quip later in the interview when Doyle offered the opinion that James Joyce was nearly unreadable. It wasn’t the criticism of Joyce that caught my attention. Doyle had said the same thing four years earlier on the centenary of Bloomsday, the day in which Joyce’s most celebrated work, Ulysses, takes place, provoking considerable consternation among Joyce-admiring literati. It was his subsequent declaration that Jennifer Johnston was the best writer in Ireland that provoked my curiosity. Doyle isn’t the only prominent Irish writer who so esteems Ms. Johnston. She is prolific and typically very well reviewed. I consider myself a pretty thorough reader of contemporary Irish writers. I’ve read and enjoyed Doyle, John Banville, Sebastian Barry, John McGahern, Bernard MacLaverty, Anne Enright, Colm Toibin, and others. There is no author whom I more admire than William Trevor. But I had never heard of Jennifer Johnston.

As it turns out, I’m not alone. Trusting Doyle’s judgment, I attempted to purchase some of her books. I went to eight bookstores and found not one of her 14 books in any of them. Nor had any Johnston book ever graced their shelves. Amazon didn’t stock a single title. She doesn’t have a U.S. publisher. I eventually purchased a half-dozen of her novels from online used-book dealers, all but one of them shipped from overseas.

I’ve had few reading experiences that were as revelatory as reading Ms. Johnston. In an introduction to a Johnston collection, Sebastian Barry wrote of “the special shock of reading an original writer for the first time.” To experience that shock can be one of the sublime pleasures of life, and I shared Barry’s exhilaration upon reading Johnston’s first novel, The Captains and the Kings. There is in her art an empathy for her characters shorn of all sentimentality, a truthful and moving appreciation that withstands the depredations of human frailty and history. Barry, who appraises her more insightfully and eloquently than can I, remarked on the “complicity” the reader senses in her work, “the speaking directly, succinctly, and at the same time, discreetly, familiarly, strangely. The recognizable contours of the complete stranger’s face.”

Excited by my late discovery of Johnston, I called my good friend, Roxanne Coady, proprietor of the great independent bookstore, RJ Julia, and one of the widest read and most perceptive readers I know, to share my enthusiasm. To my surprise, she had never read her either. Until then, I had assumed every single English-language writer of note had come under Roxanne’s intelligent scrutiny. Our mutual ignorance of Ms. Johnston sparked an ongoing conversation about why some of the best Irish writers lack the readership in this country their talents deserve.