THE GOOD FAMILY FITZGERALD

In this sprawling family saga, a wealthy Irish family wrestles with personal tragedy, the Catholic Church, and a bizarre crime.

The history of the Fitzgerald family is the stuff of generational folklore. The clan’s Irish American patriarch, Paddy, the son of an abusive father, rose from poverty to found a business empire and head a family of means and influence. However, they’re not immune to catastrophe; one day, Paddy’s 39-year-old son, Anthony, an “up-and-coming barrister” specializing in criminal law, dies suddenly of an aneurysm, leaving behind a fiancee, Francesca Scalino, who struggles to get over his absence. She also engages in a complex relationship with Anthony’s brother, Philip, a Catholic priest. Philip, meanwhile, is already in the throes of a crisis of faith as he pursues an intimate relationship with Ruth, one of his parishioners, with whom he’s in love. He’s compelled to make some hard decisions when he learns that she’s pregnant with his child. Paddy, too, faces his own romantic complications; he’s is in his twilight years but still keeps a mistress, Caitlin Cahill, in grand style in a nearby penthouse, where’s she’s at his beck and call. Their carefree relationship becomes complicated when he learns that she has a husband who’s leaning on her for cash. Di Prisco ambitiously aims to construct a generational saga, and he generously supplies a surfeit of drama and intrigue. However, he oddly turns this gossipy family soap opera into a crime story when Philip’s brother Matty, an idealistic English teacher at a Catholic high school, butts heads with Bishop Stanislaus Mackey over the school’s direction, and Matty’s wife, Claire, embarks on an “insane escapade.” As a result, the plot vacillates between maudlin melodrama and comic implausibility. The prose is so overly elaborate at times that it borders on baroque; for example, when Mackey is kidnapped and asks who his captor is, he receives this response: “Me? Who the hell do you think I am, Excellence? Let’s say I’m somebody leading you up to the Lord’s gold and bejeweled heavenly throne.” This tedious, quip-laden style will definitely not be to all tastes.

An exhausting and overwrought novel.