My Coney Island Baby

February 1, 2019
Through one day in a yearslong extramarital affair, an Irish writer looks at intimacy and estrangement in an impressive work.For more than 20 years, Michael and Caitlin have been meeting on the first Tuesday of every month and sharing a few hours in a cheap hotel in the run-down New York City beach community of Coney Island. On the winter day that dominates the story, he is 48 and she's about 44. They first appear walking through bitter cold and wind. The book's third sentence reads: "This is bleakness without respite." O'Callaghan (The Dead House, 2018, etc.) also opens with some of the book's most impressive writing, fistfuls of muscular prose that channels Seamus Heaney: "the enormous sprawl of ocean that, in close, bucks and moils. Frothing needlepoint flecks mottle a surface dull as lead, great furred bilges of surf break hard against the shoreline." It's almost showy, maybe forced--"needlepoint"? The prose settles down while remaining exceptional, elegiac and eloquent, in conveying insight and sympathy for the small cast's two main players as they face an uncertain future. Michael and his wife, Barbara, grew apart when their firstborn died after 14 weeks in ICU, and Barbara has recently been diagnosed with cancer. Caitlin and her husband have come to accept the distance between them, and she knows he has had affairs. Recently he's been offered a promotion and transfer to Peoria, Illinois. It's clear that "bleakness without respite" doesn't apply just to Coney Island in winter. Hard choices loom. Though age and guilt have colored their precious Tuesdays, the lovers still treasure them, but as the hours pass, they wonder if the moment has come for a long-avoided decision.O'Callaghan anatomizes these emotional and psychological odysseys, making a narrative light on incident compellingly readable.

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March 1, 2019
Irish native O'Callaghan (The Dead House, 2018) sets his melancholic, lushly poetic novel across the ocean, where two middle-aged, adulterous lovers have been meeting once a month for 25 years at a seedy hotel in Brooklyn's Coney Island. Michael, who lived in Ireland until emigrating at 16, works in sales. Caitlin, second-generation Irish, is a writer. On the winter day on which the majority of the novel takes place, both face circumstances that will likely prevent them from meeting again. The narrative moves between that day and the years leading up to it, during which Michael and his wife lose a baby, and Caitlin teaches herself to write fiction and then loses the impulse to write. The skeptical might wonder just how the two have managed to deceive their shadowy spouses for so many years, as well as how they have maintained such a white-hot passion through the decades, but few will be able to resist O'Callaghan's romantic spirit. Driven by language rather than plot, the novel strikes a mood as elegaic as it is sensual.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)