Wakes and Confessions

DOWN ALL THE DAYS by Christy Brown. 266 pages. Stein & Day. $6.95.

Christy Brown, 37, is one of 22 children born into a Dublin working-class family. He is also a near totally disabled victim of cerebral palsy. But literary language is not one of his infirmities. In Down All the Days, which seems more memoir than first novel, he shows a native gift for the familiar set pieces of the Irish novel: there are confession and wake scenes, tableaux of biddies drinking and Da's beating up on their wives, vignettes of funerals and prostitutes and searching parties.

Brown also includes a goodly number of O'Portnoyesque sexual gropings. Indeed, just as he tends to mistake the pulsations of language for plot, he too often confuses the artificial throbbing of sex for thematic development. There is no denying the occasional grandeur in his strokes of lyricism: "He longed to fly with the wind and seek the hidden things, the small quiet undying treasured things in the warm hearts and houses of the unknown people harboured by the night and the falling felicitous snow." Yet the final effect of these remembrances of a wheelchaired Dublin boyhood is cloyingly reductive and simplistic. Even that standard rage against the church or the state of a dying Ireland--basic fuel for so many burning Irish writers--might have been better. Instead, Brown goes gently into that good night of the sweet and sentimental ha'penny Bildungsroman.

Even so, Brown's memoirs could be easy enough to take were it not for the overwrought language used by his publisher in offering the book. There is something almost positively obscene about a flap that promises "the greatest work of art ever created by a wholly handicapped person." ("He has the full use of one limb, his left foot. And yet with the little toe of that left foot, he has typed, one letter at a time, over 15 years, Down All the Days.") This Barnumesque hawking freak-show tone manages to degrade the book and insult the limited but quite legitimate talents of the author.

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