Volume 24, Number 21 & 22 · January 26, 1978
Below Suspicion
By Robert Towers
True Confessions
by John Gregory Dunne
E.P. Dutton, 341 pp., $9.95
Transatlantic Blues
by Wilfrid Sheed
E.P. Dutton, 312 pp., $9.95
Although Roman Catholicism is a looming presence—one might almost say a major character—in both novels under review, it would be folly to attempt a serious linking of them on that (or, indeed, any other) basis. True Confessions is a scandalous romp of a book in which the Irish-American clergy and laity alike are (with token exceptions) lightheartedly depicted as blathering fools, worldly cynics, and sanctimonious or hardened knaves. They inhabit a busy world in which the only true god is the Deal and the most deadly sin is the failure of one conniving scamp to acquire the crucial information that might give him the advantage over another. In Transatlantic Blues, on the other hand, Catholicism exists primarily in the form of a bad conscience that bedevils the protagonist throughout, tempting him to discharge a voluminous load of guilt into the ear of the only confessor that will hear him—a Sony tape recorder. As entertainment, the extroverted rascality of the one wins easily over the ranting pseudo introspection of the other.
Review, 2332 words
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