Aimless wanderings of a Donegal drifter

‘GWAY OUT WEST

Anthony Glavin New Island Books, €15.99

west, young man,” a phrase credited to Horace Greeley, editor of the NewYork Tribune, can be read as an edict: get out there, see what you’re made of.

Fintan Doherty, born into the Donegal of the 1950s, doesn’t really have a lot of choice in this regard. While his surroundings aren’t quite as miserable as they often are in this kind of scenario, there isn’t much of a future for him if he stays put. Two other influences help drive him out.

One is the stories and songs of America he hears from locals who’ve returned across the Atlantic, the other is the death of his beloved mother Mary. It’s a scene that Glavin handles with touching skill as Fintan’s father’s true feelings are revealed, sat at an empty table, his face in his hands, with a repeated, “fuair sí bás orm [she died on me]”.

After exploratory trips to England and then France and Germany, to loosen “his static, home-anchored self”, Fintan feels ”a familiar keen-edged longing for where he’d never been... those fabled, wide-open spaces in the storied land of plenty.”

He catches a standby flight and once he arrives in the States, the novel morphs from a woe-is-us account to a sort of Twainian/ Kerouacian bildungsroman.

After a year in Cleveland working the usual jobs, he moves around the continent like a Chuck Berry lyric, racking up place names, lovers, and experience. He’s a carnival roustabout working with Elvis the Mouse in Wisconsin, then in Laredo that truly feels like the West, then accidentally transported to Colorado after falling asleep on a truck.

Glavin’s hero is a likeable sort. Carla, a female character who lasts longer than most, asks him, “You don’t stop, do you? You can’t stay anywhere?” and there will always be a certain romance in that. On the other hand, she reckons his “drifting doesn’t allow for a lot of purchase on things” and that’s the problem.

Interesting characters are quickly left behind when Fintan puts his thumb out and Glavin’s travelogue doesn’t quite have the rush of Kerouac or the humour of Twain to carry it.

Despite the search for a picture of his mother painted by a visiting artist, and the author’s affection for the poetic breadth of his home country, Doherty’s wanderings “seeking something he cannot yet quite define” are just a tad too aimless.