Why Should You Doubt Me Now?

An apparition of the Virgin Mary appears in the Dublin flat of conservative, womanizing newspaper columnist Rupert Penrose, catching him and young reporter Attracta Dorris in flagrante. The upsetting--and mobile--vision becomes the pole around which Breasted ( I Shouldn't Be Telling You This ), an American journalist who has lived in Ireland, organizes the action of her witty, spirited novel. As Penrose vies with literature professor Dennis McDermott for the prestigious Kerrygold Chair of Irish Letters at City University of Dublin, the homesick Papal Nuncio, Padre Destino, copes with Irish weather and the rigidity of his small-minded assistant, Bishop Meany. Honoria Houlihan, the outspoken, pro-choice, female Vice President of the U.S., proposes to make a Christmas-time visit to her ancestral land as Dublin police Chief Superintendent Bloom tracks the vision as it moves from Penrose's bedroom to a pub, to the kitchen of a Protestant woman and finally to the suburban barn of a Dublin developer who has found himself involved with the IRA. Breasted's perfectly aimed dialogue and brisk action skewer the jumbled politics--sexual, religious and marital, in academia and the governing Dail--that shape life in modern Ireland. (Nov.)