Green Dreams: Essays Under the Influence of the Irish

This collection of essays by the noted Irish-American novelist Stephens, author of The Brooklyn Book of the Dead (Fiction Forecasts, Jan. 3), is something worse than a marathon conversation with a drunk, for the talker here is a well-read literary man who has stopped drinking and won't let you forget it. If drink and literary endeavor have anything in common, it is perhaps their orality: in this case, deprived of one mode, Stephens wildly overindulges in the other. Structured in three parts--``Fighting,'' ``Writing'' and ``Drinking''--the book sets forth a trinity of pursuits that are hardly in need of the kind of hyperbolic ennobling Stephens gives them. The essays in the first section are at best raw outtakes from his novels about life in Brooklyn; in the essays on that other Irish trinity--Joyce, Beckett and Yeats--Stephens's observations are steeped in vats of blarney--``At the banquet of the moderns, you will find even the poets step back from the feast until the prosemaster Joyce is seated.'' One can only imagine an audience of Irish grandchildren for these grandiose pronouncements. The book's final essays, maudlin reminiscences about the romance and horrors of boozing, are certainly vindications of the man who stopped drinking, but they are unflattering of the man who couldn't stop writing about it. (Apr.)