The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Irish Wine: The Trilogy by Dick WimmerEamonn Wall
Dick Wimmer. Irish Wine: The Trilogy. Penguin, 2001. 330 pp. Paper: $13.00.
Irish Wine is an exuberant romp through Ireland, Britain, and the United States. It is part Candide, part Ginger Man, and part At Swim-Two-Birds in its wild pacing, its zany collection of misfits, and its bizarre coincidences and love triangles. There’s so much action in these three novellas that it’s hard to keep pace; it is as if one were trying to follow a cartoon played at fast-forward. The central figures are Seamus Boyne, a painter living in Ireland, and Gene Hagar, a failed writer who is running his family’s pest control business on Long Island. At the outset, both men are down on their luck. At the same time that Boyne is trying to commit suicide, sinister characters are trying to murder him. Hagar hates the family business and his wife has just left him. Wimmer traces the late flowering of Boyne’s career as an artist when he is lauded by the art world and raised to the level of celebrity, as well as the rebirth of Hagar as a fiction writer and teacher. He also explores the women, both living and dead, with whom they have shared their lives. Both Ciara, Hagar’s lost love and the subject of Boyne’s best work, and Tory, Boyne’s daughter (who will become Hagar’s wife), are delightfully unpredictable. Although Wimmer has a good understanding of the comic possibilities present in the Anglo-Irish world, the best work of the trilogy is to be found in Hagar’s Dream, the American novella. In particular, the softball games on Long Island involving Hagar, his friends from high school, and Boyne are side-splitting. Among other things, this final novella is as wonderful a send-up of The Great Gatsby as one is likely to read. [Eamonn Wall]