Volume 44, Number 16 · October 23, 1997
Family Secrets
By Thomas Flanagan
Reading in the Dark
by Seamus Deane
Knopf, 246 pp., $23.00
The opening page of Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark suggests, in its deliberate spareness, qualities which in the unfolding will more fully reveal themselves. It is a childhood experience, but the voice speaking across the years is poised and literary—'a plain silence,' 'the look of a faint memory.' We learn that it is a working-class house—the staircase brief, the lino pattern rubbed away. It is a house across which shadows fall that may be supernatural, visitants. This is a culture, we soon learn, in which spirits are given a half-credulous, half-skeptical acceptance. 'People with green eyes were close to the fairies, we were told; they were just there for a little while, looking for a human child they could take away.'
Review, 3047 words
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