cover image KILBRACK: Or, Who Is Nancy Valentine?

KILBRACK: Or, Who Is Nancy Valentine?

Jamie O'Neill, . . Scribner, $14 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-5595-0

Written a decade before Irish author O'Neill's breakthrough novel At Swim, Two Boys , this richly comic tale is at once a satire of Irish popular novels and exemplar of the genre. The book boasts a highly unusual hero, O'Leary Montagu, so named by the nurse who 11 years earlier found him, at age 25, facially scarred and wholly amnesiac after being struck by an automobile. Wracked by a host of strange compulsions, O'Leary is obsessed with an unpublished memoir he discovers, Ill Fares the Land by one Nancy Valentine, about her decaying hometown of Kilbrack and its endearingly odd inhabitants. After countless rereadings of the memoir (its title is rendered on O'Leary's copy as Ill Farts the Land , one of many such embarrassing "misprints"), O'Leary finally decides he must visit Kilbrack and the author to write her biography. What he discovers in the supposedly abandoned Kilbrack isn't at all what he expects. The outrageous cast, nearly all of whom seem to be characters in the memoir, are hilarious, and O'Leary himself is a memorable addition to the roll of heroes of Irish literature, with his endearing tics and habits. Constantly making brief mental "diary memos," he also clutches in his pocket his version of a security blanket (a mysterious "lemon jiffy") and waits five full minutes before entering a public toilet to be certain no one is inside. Only the crude homophobia of O'Leary's father jars in this idyll of satiric nostalgia. (Feb. 24)