Review: Way Out West

Anthony Glavin, Way Out West, (New Island Books, 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205796187-way-out-west

A thoroughly human story about Ireland and America, and everything in between.

Picture Fintan growing up in Donegal, a three-room whitewashed cottage still thatched in 1955, in Glenbay, where ‘the wide world washed in from time to time’, where praying against fairies only stopped with Father Boyle’s arrival. His uncle Condy and other returned émigrés ‘swap lies about America’, filling an emotional gap after his mother dies.

This creates a wanderlust in him, and he never stops, London, Paris, Hanover, Ohio, St Louis, Wisconsin, San Francisco, Boston, a ‘self missing in motion’. He voraciously reads books which he gets from libraries. He searches for a painting of his mother by an American artist, which becomes a metaphor for his unrestful soul, which shies from the ‘overblown excesses’ of America, yet hunts for ‘the bleed between a storied past and the here and now’.

‘To be here now is more about consciousness than locale.’

It begins slowly, as we meet Fintan’s parents Packy and Mary and all the characters in the village. The novel’s structure roves like Fintan, its storytelling style, while wholly appropriate, is hard to sink one’s teeth into at first. He moves from town to town ‘like a dart thrown on a map’, from job to job, observing America, the people, the ‘earnestness’. The stories aren’t tall tales, just little vignettes of humanity.

Author Glavin is an émigré from the other direction, from Boston to Donegal, yet his work has an Irish feel, with pathos, subtlety and vivid storytelling. His portraits of Glenbay folk seem so authentic, I’d bet he himself has heard some of those stories. He sees America through Irish eyes.

There’s an understated loneliness pervading this novel, all the more poignant as the language is beautiful, the people, their stories and the little vignettes wondrous.

This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.