Sorry, wrong family

Apologize, Apologize! follows a well-to-do,
highly dysfunctional Irish-American clan

by JULIET WATERS

Apologize, Apologize by Elizabeth Kelly opens with a paragraph that reads like the opening to the perfect summer novel: “I grew up on Martha’s Vineyard in a house as big and loud as a parade—the clamour resonated along the entire New England coastline. Calliope whistling, batons soaring, trumpets bleating, everything tapping and humming, orchestrated chaos, but we could afford it. My mother was rich, her father’s money falling from the sky like tickertape, gently suppressing the ordinary consequences of all that noise.”

Narrator Collie Flanagan is born on November 22, 1963 the day Kennedy was shot. Bad omen, notwithstanding, we expect his life to be only a slight paraphrase of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” His mamma’s rich and his daddy’s good looking. So hush little baby…

Unfortunately, this baby will have a lot to cry about. Anais “Ma” Flanagan is a mean-spirited narcissist, a reactionary philanthropist with left-wing pretensions. Charlie “Pa” Flanagan is “a stray, a drinker, and a womanizer, professionally Irish, a guy of mixed pedigree that Ma plucked off the streets because she was mad for his hair colour, the same shade as a ruby red King Charles spaniel.”

Lurking in the background is Collie’s media baron grandfather, Peregrine Lowell. Collie and his younger brother Bingo nickname him The Falcon. “An Anglo-Irish Protestant on loan to New England from Ulster, he was bored by the conversation of field mice, and it showed.” The Falcon and his daughter wage an incessant, bitter, endlessly petty war. “The Falcon wanted us named after birds—Larkin and Robin were his choices—but Ma infuriated him by naming us after dogs instead.”

Collie’s life has a fairy tale quality to it, but the scary, dark Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales, not the facile Disney ones. As the family scapegoat, he grows up the helpless repository for all their narcissistic projections. His mother makes no disguise of favouring the wild child, Bingo. In fact, she prides herself on it. Even his “maiden uncle,” a Flanagan brother who decides to move in and keep house for the family, and who in any other story would be the fairy godfather figure, is not much of an ally. Collie’s only refuge is school. But the better he does academically, the more contempt he inspires from his bitter, negligent caretakers.

Collie is soft-hearted and bright, even when he seems to be a little low in personality. A Harry Potter without the Hogwarts. You know he’s destined for great things, but just when he’s on the verge of achieving them, cruel fate inevitably steps in, making this a little more Lemony Snicket than J.K. Rowling. But mostly it reminds me of Coraline, the movie.

Kelly is blessed with an inexhaustible supply of gallows humour. But sometimes her descriptions work better if you imagine reading them with 3D glasses. Here’s Ma upon learning of Collie’s unforgivably “bourgeois” decision to go to Brown: “Her hair was getting curlier by the moment, each serpentine tendril coiling into a series of mini-tornadoes blowing wildly, the room seeming to swirl and spin…the world around me took on a deep indigo blue colour, Ma’s eyes flashing like heat lightning.”

This is, however, supposed to be a book for adults. Midway, the novel shifts into serious as Collie is confronted by genuine trauma after genuine trauma. First he must grieve two deaths in the family. Then there’s an ill-fated trip to El Salvador where, within the space of a chapter, he sees child labourers thrown overboard and finds himself in the jungle picking maggots out of an infected wound.

Early on, Collie mentions the “compulsive vividness” of his parents. This seems to be a fair criticism of Kelly’s writing style as well. And like her narrator, she has everything she needs to be hugely successful. Yet this story never quite rises to the occasion she’s presented us with. Still, it’s an extremely promising debut.

APOLOGIZE, APOLOGIZE! BY ELIZABETH
KELLY, KNOPF CANADA, HC,
324 PP., $29.95