A LANDSCAPE OF LOVE

DERMOT HEALY'S MEMOIR OF IRELAND AND THE BOND OF PARENTS AND CHILD

Author: By Peggy O'Brien

Date: SUNDAY, March 15, 1998

Page: F1

Section: Books

This authorial self-conciousness about memory's tricks and fiction's treacheries protects Healy's memoir from the excesses of ``Angela's Ashes,'' which seems an unself-critical string of ancedotes, shiny and smooth, like pub stories burnished by too much telling. Healy is on his guard not to commit this and other sins against rigor -- interjecting, for instance, a stern corrective to ``nostalgia that steals material from the same source as fiction, and then leaves the reality wanting.''

Such scrupulosity could be an irritant, a postmodernist tic, if it weren't, as it is here, completely justified. It signals concerns that permeate every layer of this consistently challenging and satisfying book. For Healy, memory, always at a frustrating remove -- or several generational removes -- from fact, cleaves even more to the shards that don't fit, like the author's memory of his mother's childhood memory of a certain middle-aged man, fond of drink, who once stood behind his wife in their grocery shop, stark naked with an umbrella raised above his head. This paradoxical image, suggesting both exposure and protection, is like memory itself, and like fiction -- perhaps most of all the thinly veiled self-fictions of memoir.

Healy's family suffers from a traumatic rupture when his father's health forces a premature retirement and they must move from the village of Finea, in West Meath, to Cavan Town. There Healy's mother, Winnie, joins her sister, Maisie, in running the Breifne, a bakery and cafe. This abrupt transition, which will come to mean opportunity for the adolescent Healy -- fast girls, the cinema, and streetcorner life -- at first means the irrecoverable loss of his childhood. All this is summed up in one striking conceit based on a practice his family adopts of eating at a table that looks straight into a huge mirror: ``We were never fully ourselves, but always possessed by others. When someone entered the room, we spoke to them through the mirror. The family, when they conversed, never had to look directly at each other. We learned faithlessness and duplicity from an early age.'' Healy, whose imagination readily embraces paradox, makes this alienation and fragmentation also the wellspring of his compassion and the cohering principle of his identity -- in short, his capacity to love.

``The Bend for Home'' is an exceedingly tender story of the relationship between a father and a son. Each, as though unconsciously affirming an uncanny fusion, manages the loss of Finea by taking to sleepwalking, trying to get back home, recover the idyll, live permanently in the mirror. The two enjoy an almost animal closeness. When his wife is temporarily away and Dermot is still a child, the father innocently sleeps in the same bed with his son; during his teenage years, when the father is slowly dying of emphysema, the son sits silently by his father's side for hours, doing his homework. To watch Healy's personal development in this memoir, particularly during adolesence, is like observing chaos theory in action. He careers from one crisis to the next, is mired in lies and deceptions, the dubious first stirrings of art, yet somehow manages to stay intact, flourish, grow more and more honest. The miracle is that for all the alcohol and drugs consumed and the human wretchedness endured (much of it self-induced), the author emerges as a man of integrity, generosity, staying power, and heart.

Everything comes together for Healy, his metaphysical concerns and unmediated experience, in the final, elegiac yet raucous section, an account of a brief stint of looking after his geriatric mother and the even older but hailer Maisie. The sisters are living out their days in vicious but fond codependence in an overheated, hacienda-style bungalow outside Cavan Town. Maisie, the star of the entire memoir, is a character for the author in both indivisible senses of the word and makes being larger than life seem the key to life. Far from diminished by age, she has the moxie to kick her chamberpot the length of the hallway in the morning, ahead of her walker, and the mental vitality to be in awe of the idea of man going to the moon.

Observing and detailing the freedoms that the aging mind, senile or not, takes with reality, Healy makes it seem that the luminous condition of fiction is the end toward which human existence aspires. In his novel ``A Goat's Song,'' the writer-protagonist, suffering from a nervous breakdown, heals himself in a mental hospital by recording the life stories of the other inmates and having them return the favor. Similarly, the cathartic climax of his memoir is an epic night during which the two sisters in the company of a third, Nancy, steep themselves in drink and stories. This is the moment when Healy, if he were going to fall fatally into sentimentality, would have; but his deception is full of sad discernment as well as hilarity. Memory, which provides the incomplete script, is full of black holes, blind alleys, and half-truths but still promises recovery. The sisters stay up most of the night reminiscing, trying to stave off the final darkness. The stories are all they have left, each woman a separate story, each needing the others to try to tell the full story. Grieving his mother's increasing dementia, Healy registers the loss as only a writer would: ``Looking after Mother is like watching language losing its meaning.'' The secret of this robust and subtly crafted memoir's success is that it affirms the belief throughout that the life force and the creative impulse are one.