Emerald Blues

By Paul Gray

WORLD WITHOUT END, AMEN

by JIMMY BRESLIN

329 pages. Viking. $6.95.

In his first novel, Columnist Jimmy Breslin copped a plea. Instead of drawing on his vast knowledge of New York's underbelly, he turned out a spoof on the Mafia called The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. In his second effort, a richer and wiser Breslin pleads a cop, comes up with a truly arresting character: Dermot Davey, 29, an Irish Catholic New York patrolman who does not "like one hour of one day of one week of his life."

Breslin runs--or rather walks--his hero through a premise rife with possibilities. Take Davey, in whom the mere glimpse of an as yet undertrodden black arouses sadistic impulses, and send him off to visit the ravaged ghettos of Northern Ireland, where Davey's own people curse and stone the bobby on the beat. Put him through some particularly nasty scenes of Ulster violence, cast him into the arms of a pretty young revolutionary who talks suspiciously like the Communist Antichrist every force in his past has taught him to hate.

Dynamite? Not quite. Instead of fizzing with life, Breslin's story usually sloshes like stale stout. He seems to miss the clipped confines of a newspaper column or magazine piece. Convincing evocations of blue-collar Saturday nights in Queens or of Bogside palaver in Londonderry stretch out until insights petrify into caricature. There are, to be sure, redeeming glimpses. Among them: the fanatic neatness of an Irish Republican Army bullyboy and Davey's sudden realization that cleanliness and godliness don't always walk together. In World Without End, Amen, Breslin weighs in as a serious novelist, then takes himself too seriously. The narrative's bog-slogging pace is a shame, be cause Breslin clearly cares, and can teach much about people who seldom turn up in current fiction: frustrated cops, tiresome racists, lower-middle-class wives with horizons defined by mortgage payments and broken washing machines. Breslin knows this turf, but he seems to have taken his title too literally. Under his ministrations, an instructive tour is slowly transformed into an endless vigil.

sb Paul Gray

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