FACES ALONG THE BAR

Cranny’s second outing (The Storm, originally published as On Us They Poor Children, not reviewed) explores the disintegrating cohesiveness of an Irish Catholic community in 1957 Brooklyn.

Young Father Darcy gives a sermon preaching inclusiveness that makes him unpopular in a neighborhood already edgy with suspicion and resentment about encroaching change. The Dodgers are threatening to leave Ebbets Field for LA. Italians have already moved in and there are rumors about blacks and Hispanics. Red Dahlgren and his sister Annie, however, both feel stifled by the neighborhood’s narrow-mindedness. Red, a police detective secretly plans to escape to California with his Italian fiancée as soon as he can bring himself to tell his widowed mother. Annie, a high-school senior, dreams of escaping through her college scholarship. Although officially going steady with a luggish neighborhood boy, she is actually having a serious love affair with Toby Walters, the one black kid in her class, who also happens to be athletic and brilliant enough to have earned his own scholarship to Columbia. When Annie is raped and murdered, suspicion falls on Toby, and the crowd at Kerrigan’s bar shows definite mob tendencies. But Red’s buddy Jack Treacy, who returned from Korea emotionally damaged, suspects himself. A hopeless binge drunk, he wakes up the morning after Annie’s death with no memory of the previous night but with a scratched face and bloodied clothes. In guilty panic he goes to Father Darcy, who takes him to the precinct where Red, unbelievably assigned his own sister’s case, and his Jewish partner refuse to consider Treacy’s evidence. They want to believe Toby is guilty, and they have a witness, the unlikable Harry who stole Red’s first girlfriend while Red was in Korea. In a weird twist, the false witness, lying out of weakness, is portrayed as villainous, while the real villain comes across as troubled but basically decent.

Heavy-handed introspection and earnest social realism.