A pedophile priest who targets deaf boys leaves a legacy of blighted lives and lost faith in this heavy-handed play.
Part I, set in the 1970s, introduces Father Larry O’Malley, principal of St. John’s School for the Deaf and the star of Milwaukee’s Catholic archdiocese thanks to the warmhearted charisma that makes both students and donors adore him. Unfortunately, O’Malley harnesses that charisma to sexually molest teenage boys in his charge while building a wall of complicit silence among the school’s staff. After a brief, veiled assault scene in 1960, time shifts to 1974, when James Grady and two friends, now in their 20s, discover they were all victimized by O’Malley; they vow to unmask him. When the police shrug off their accusations, and mealy-mouthed church hierarchs stonewall—“just heresy, excuse me, I mean hearsay,” blusters an archbishop—James and his friends go to the media with their accusations. Part II jumps ahead to the early 1990s, with alcoholic James unemployed and still full of rage over the long-ago molestation, his friends leading similarly haunted lives. Convinced that closure requires a final reckoning with O’Malley, James mounts a campaign to have the aging priest formally defrocked, an effort that bogs down in the church’s legalism and ingrained equivocation. Medugno, a playwright, and Seago, a deaf actor, are pointed in their condemnation of church policies on priestly abusers as well as in their discussion of problems of the deaf and hard-of-hearing. (Most of the dialogue is both spoken and signed, and the playwrights insist that deaf and hard-of-hearing actors play those specific roles.) As a result, there’s didacticism in the script, with characters sometimes speaking direct exposition to the audience or declaiming their anger—“Shame on you!”—to O’Malley’s imagined presence. Lacking Part I’s narrative structure of crime and revelation, Part II’s rumination on the psychological aftermath feels feckless and overwrought; as James bemoans the ruination of his life from a single brief assault, one starts to empathize with other characters who urge him to move on. The play’s high point is the revelation of the creepy deceptions—and self-deceptions—with which O’Malley weaves his religious strictures into his violation of children; it’s a compelling, and revolting, portrait of a warped moral sensibility.
A sometimes stilted, sometimes psychologically incisive dramatization of Catholic sex-abuse scandals.
Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499272895
Page Count: 174
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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