[caption id="attachment_67409" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Irish American Writers & Artists cofounder Malachy McCourt, novelist William Kennedy, the New York Times' Dan Barry and IAW&A president Peter Quinn at the ceremony at which Kennedy was honored with the organization's inaugural Eugene O'Neill Lifetime Achievement Award."]
William Kennedy has been writing for a living since the 1950s and became known mainly as a novelist from the 1970s on. Still, despite his many awards, including a Pulitzer, and decades of critical acclaim, it must still be gratifying for him to get great reviews. And they've been coming in thick and fast for his latest: "Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes."
In the New York Times the Sunday before last, the director, screenwriter and actor John Sayles ended his thus: "Kennedy, master of the Irish-American lament in works like 'Billy Phelan's Greatest Game' and 'Ironweed,' proves here that he can play with both hands and improvise on a theme without losing the beat. At 83 years old, he remains a writer we hope to hear more from."
Dublin-born Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright, who did our PageTurner column two weeks ago, also got a great review in the same edition of the Times. Novelist Francine Prose said: "Ultimately, 'The Forgotten Waltz' evokes Enright's Irish literary colleagues less than it does a tour de force like Ford Madox Ford's novel 'The Good Soldier,' a book whose narrator has only a partial and flawed idea of the story being told. 'The Forgotten Waltz' is a nervy enterprise, an audacious bait-and-switch. Cloaked in a novel about a love affair is a ferocious indictment of the self-involved material girls our era has produced."
Charity is not enough
The most recent editorial in the Jesuit weekly America begins: "In a now infamous Republican presidential debate, the candidate Ron Paul shrugged off society's responsibility to care for a hypothetical young man, comatose and declining, who had been too vainglorious to pay for health insurance. 'That's what freedom is all about," Paul said, 'taking your own risks.' Should society just let him die? While Paul struggled to respond, members of the audience whooped and cheered. 'Yes!' came the answer."
Paul did say that the churches not government should look after the unfortunate, but the Jesuit magazine's editors weren't having any of that.
"The conceit that churches and charities could replace government neatly ignores a few mundane facts about charities and giving. Many church organizations already receive the lion's share of their budgets from government grants and contracts for services. And many of the clients charities serve are not the kind of people who evoke much sympathy from givers: the chronically unemployed, the disabled and sick, the drug-addicted, the poorly educated and, most poignantly, the children of all of these people. With government out of the way, are most citizens really prepared to open their hearts and wallets to address the many and complex needs of society's broken and vulnerable people?"
It continued: "And the psychological, even spiritual effects of such a wholesale conversion of government interventions to voluntary services is worth considering. Would it not reduce petitioners for assistance into powerless objects of pity, literally charity cases? Should families bankrupted by a medical crisis, workers driven from their jobs by economic structural changes beyond their control and even people disabled by their addictions have to come hat in hand for handouts? Such a structure degrades human dignity and promotes a smug delusion of autonomy and self-reliance among a patron class of society's winners, separated from, even pitted against, those in need."
After a discussion on the appropriate role of government, the editorial concluded: "The Catholic tradition, in fact, maintains an affirmative view of the positive role of government in addressing needs that have not been satisfied by the market system. And from this perspective the church accepts a collaborative, supplemental function with government, not replacing it or standing as a counterforce to it.
"We all share responsibility for the common good. It is an obligation we can partly meet through our government - a higher association of our neighbors and friends and family, acting on behalf of all."
