Volume 46, Number 18 · November 18, 1999
The Tragicomic Dubliner
By John Banville
No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien
by Anthony Cronin
Fromm International, 260 pp., $29.95
At Swim-Two-Birds
by Flann O'Brien
Dalkey Archive Press, 316 pp., $13.95 (paper)
A mean life may have a tragic cast to it, and vice versa. The Irish writer Flann O'Brien was dour, suspicious, argumentative—sometimes to the point of physical violence—petty-minded, careless of his own talent, and, especially in his later years, a bibulous bore. This misanthrope and likely misogynist was also the author of one of the most admired and widely read comic novels of the century, At Swim-Two-Birds, and a fictional masterpiece, The Third Policeman, which remained unpublished in his own lifetime—he died in 1966 when he was fifty-five—and which he cannibalized for a much inferior work, The Dalkey Archive (his latest American publishers have been unwise enough to adopt its title as a trade name). The portrait of O'Brien by his sometime acquaintance—friend would be too strong a word—and drinking companion Anthony Cronin is not a pretty one, though it is unnervingly honest. O'Brien was, Cronin writes,
Review, 4669 words
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