Word: skeffingtons
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CANDIDACY DECLARED. By Patrick Kennedy, 20, youngest child of Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, for the House of Representatives from Rhode Island's Ninth District; in Providence. Kennedy, who will be a junior at Providence College this fall, will challenge Representative John M. Skeffington Jr. in a September primary. He thus becomes the youngest member of his clan ever to run for public office...
...because there are so few Jewish politicians on the national scene to serve as stereotypes, and partly because Halberstam and O'Connor have written about two very different topics. The Last Hurrah comes across as O'Connor's dirge at the death of traditional Irish-American society, and Frank Skeffington, the larger-than-life caricature, served quite neatly as a symbol of a vanishing way of life. The Wanting of Levine, by contrast, takes on no such broad sociological theme. A.L. Levine's odyssey is an intensely personal one, the maturing of a fascinating character who happens to be Jewish...
...saying that Levine manages to say a lot about the role of ethnic groups in politics, especially at a time when the conventional melting-pot wisdom has it that ethnic differences are growing ever less important as a political force. Indeed, it's tempting to compare Levine to Frank Skeffington, the endearingly roguish Irish political boss who cheerfully dominates everyone around him in Edwin O'Connor's classic The Last Hurrah. On the surface, it works. Like Skeffington, Levine has an acute awareness of his culture, and uses it to full advantage--although to Levine this requires much more subtle...
...there the comparison ends. Where Skeffington is a symbol, the healthiest specimen around of the classic Irish pol, Levine is very much a human being, his own man rather than the property of every voter who happens to own a brogue or a pug nose...
Parallel Lines. At first sight, Charlie Carmody seems to have the gusto of Frank Skeffington, the roguish politician (modeled on James Michael Curley) who ran away with the earlier novel. But Charlie dwindles into a gabby stage Irishman. Father Kennedy promises to be one of Graham Greene's degraded but tormented priests. Instead, his anguish is smothered in resignation, and his vocation is feeble. Compared with The Last Hurrah, this novel is a kind of lost begorra...