by Darcy O’Brien; introduction by Seamus Heaney
New York Review Books, 160 pp., $12.95 (paper) When it was originally published in 1977, A Way of Life, Like Any Other garnered the PEN/Hemingway Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize; that it’s been out-of-print since then is the only sobering thing about this recently reissued, hilarious Hollywood novel. Darcy O’Brien, a novelist and scholar of Irish literature who died in 1998, was the son of Thirties movie stars George O’Brien (Riders of the Purple Sage) and Marguerite Churchill (Alibi for Murder), and judging from the neglected, autobiographical A Way of Life …, he commenced with the note-taking at birth. “My inquiries into human understanding had taught me that my father was as constantly constant as a rock and my mother as constantly inconstant as the sea. And that wasn’t much to go on,” the adolescent narrator quips in his typically mordant way. As a child, he grew up at “Casa Fiesta,” a lavish estate that Richie Rich would have adored, but because fame is fickle, his parents’ lives crumble in divorce and disillusion once they’re not offered the plum roles they were once begged to perform. Life gets interesting right away for their son, who watches as his father becomes a wacky, Navy-obsessed right-winger who insists on calling his child “Salty” and telling people who knew him in his heyday that he’s “not at liberty” to reveal what he’s been doing all these years. (His friend Marshall Marshall, a John Bircher, is convinced that “a recent failure of the cranberry crop was a communist plot to undermine the integrity of the Thanksgiving dinner.”) His glamorous, melodramatic mother trots all over the globe searching for the right man but only unearths a variety of well-meaning but odd characters like Anatol, a crazed Russian artist who can be counted on to get “maggoty drunk” with his new wife. Managing his parents (i.e., keeping them at a distance) while confronting the usual teenage hurdles — falling in love for the first time, anxiety about college — this child of Hollywood has a story that is part satire, part insightful coming-of-age tale, and entirely funny.
This article appears in October 19 • 2001.