Darcy O'Brien (1939–1998)

"My father was as constantly constant as a rock and my mother as constantly inconstant as the sea", 2 May 2016

This review is from: A Way of Life, Like Any Other (Hardcover)
Highly entertaining short (150p) novel, narrated by the son of a Hollywood showbiz couple. From the luxurious early years on the family ranch, things soon go downhill; mother takes to drink and a succession of unsuitable lovers, becoming ever more maudlin and selfish. Father, meanwhile, lives in the past, hankering for show more his wife and the long-gone glory years, and the son has to look out for himself...
Frequently laugh-out-loud funny, but sad too, as the reader experiences the death of family ties - the close childhood relationship with his mother culminating in "I had come to wish her dead." show less

To his patients in the impoverished area of Southern Illinois known as Little Egypt, general practitioner Dale Canvaness could do no wrong. His employees and family, however, saw another side to him--alcoholic, abusive and completely lacking in empathy for others. When two of Canvaness's four sons were found shot to death in separate incidents, it was hard for the residents of Saline County, IL to believe that their trusted physician had anything to do with it. The evidence told another show more story.

Murder in Little Egypt is a frustrating read. Author Darcy O'Brien shares anecdote after anecdote describing Canvaness's mistreatment of those closest to him, yet the physician gets away with bad, even murderous, behavior time and again. Canvaness's second wife, who was one of O'Brien's informants for the book, is a particularly pathetic figure, always hoping against hope that her sociopathic husband would somehow change back into the fun-loving man she thought she had married.

Detailed and slow-paced, this book is recommended for the true-crime reader with a strong tolerance for human failings. show less

A strange book that reads as a fictionalised autobiography of a boy growing up in 1950’s Los Angeles/Hollywood with parents who were in the movies, but had fallen on hard times (relatively) by the time he was a teenager.
The writing style feels detached and mannered, and Seamus Heaney in the introduction to my edition describes it as giving “a heightened, necessarily overdone picture of what his childhood and adolescence were like”. However, after the first few chapters I fell into the show more rhythm of the language and was moderately engaged, but the author seemed determined to intentionally undermine the emotional impact whenever created by his narrative. show less

If you like your humor dry, as I often do, you will find yourself laughing out loud at a few points. Unfortunately, the detatched tone of this first-person fictional memoir never varies, and I plowed through all the chapters only to find an ending on a very sour note. We start the novel cheering for the wryness with which the young (14?) narrator approaches his Edvard Munch home life, but end it (perhaps three years later in the narrative) having observed no healing or emotional growth. When show more there is no redemption, laughter turns bitter.

I agree with reviewer CarltonC, who put it this way: "the author seemed determined to intentionally undermine the emotional impact whenever created by his narrative." show less