DISTURBANCE
Jamie O'Neill, . . Scribner, $13 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-5596-7
Nilus, protagonist of this mordant psychological tale, finds his world falling down around his ears. After his mother dies, his sickly, eccentric father gets embroiled in a battle with his uncle, an ex-socialist turned wealthy businessman who is trying to demolish their run-down house and neighborhood to make room for an office development. To block it all out, Nilus develops an obsessive-compulsive complex, fixating on chipped crockery and bedsheet creases, and continually scrambling and remaking a featureless black jigsaw puzzle, as if by rectifying tiny elements of disorder he can escape the larger chaos of life. As Nilus's longing for meaningful pattern degenerates from a droll disdain for human messiness into dark hallucination, he uncomprehendingly absorbs the Irish conflict between a comforting if rigid mythic and revolutionary past and a disillusioned, prosaic present. Published now in America in the wake of his well-received
Reviewed on: 12/06/2004
Genre: Fiction