Oh, Play That Thing - ISBNLookup.com

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Together, A Star Called Henry and Oh, Play That Thing constitute one of the most remarkable achievements in recent Irish and American literature. And we’re left with the tantalizing possibility of a third novel to follow.

Boston Phoenix

Oh, Play That Thing chronicles the birth of the American century, from the shores of Ellis Island through the Jazz Age and into the Great Depression. Doyle’s characters are too lively-too full-blooded and lusty-to be mere ciphers, and the Booker Prize-winning author gets the feel of things-jazz, regret, memory-right.

Chicago Sun-Times

Written in a combo jazzed-up sassy poetry-rhythms part Irish, part New York street, part Chicago South Side blues This is Doyle’s rambunctious tale of the 20th century’s immigrant America.

Philadelphia Weekly

Vibrant, punchy images come in quick succession, evoking city streets teeming with life and possibility like the gritty poetics of John Dos Passos.

New York Daily News

Doyle can make music come alive like no one else. His prose will bop and bang its head to punk or bump and grind to the blues. And he understands that becoming an American-whether you’re black or Irish-is a game of improvisation, just like jazz.

Rocky Mountain News

A sprawling tale steeped in the grit, lawlessness and hardships of the early 1900s it all unfolds in Doyle’s bold, vivid writing that, at its best, echoes the adventure and rhythm of jazz. By the end, he has us hooked, racing for the finish to a book we wish wouldn’t end and eager for the final installment.

Publishers Weekly

Doyle stumbles somewhat in this sequel to his excellent 1999 bestseller, A Star Called Henry. Beginning with Irish revolutionary Henry Smart's arrival in New York City in 1924, the story follows Henry's subsequent adventures in advertising, bootlegging, pornography, unlicensed dentistry and keeping ahead of the former associates who'd like to see him eat a lead sandwich. After encroaching too much on a mobster's turf-and getting lucky with another powerful fellow's kept lady-Henry hightails it to Chicago, where he becomes the unofficial manager of a young Louis Armstrong. Though serendipitously reunited with his beloved wife and the daughter he's never met while trying to rob her employer's house, Henry soon heads back to New York to help Louis make it big. While just as brash and lively as Doyle's earlier novels, this one isn't nearly as focused; the dialogue-heavy narrative is interspersed with shifts in setting, time and plot, and characters appear and disappear with little consequence, their spoken parts hasty, repetitive and often perplexing. Worse, Doyle takes Henry Smart's charm for granted; readers unfamiliar with his previous adventures may roll their eyes at his arrogance and incessant sexual encounters. There's just too much material; any of the novel's numerous strands could have been fleshed out into its own book. That said, the novel is still a lot of improbable fun. Agent, John Sutton. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Terrorist Henry Smart, the memorable IRA antihero of Doyle's superb sixth novel (A Star Called Henry, 1999) makes an imperfect conquest of America in this widely ranging sequel. We pick up Henry's story in 1924, after his arrival in New York City (just ahead of gunmen assigned to kill him) and entry into the criminal underclass as an "advertising" impresario employing sandwich-board bearers. Still pining for the wife left behind, whom he knew only as "Miss O'Shea" (she having been his teacher), Henry-a strapping 23-year-old few women can resist-finds substitutes, and reasons to head west after he has infringed on mobster Louis Lepke's turf and pleasured himself with the mistress of Hibernian-immigrant bootlegger Owney Madden. In Chicago, Henry discovers the "furious, happy and lethal" newly popular music called jazz, and bonds-rather unbelievably-with the young Louis Armstrong, who makes Henry (amusingly addressed as "O'Pops") his de facto "white manager." If you think this is beginning to sound like Forrest Gump, read on. Briefly and improbably reunited with Miss O'Shea and the daughter (Saoirse) he's never seen, Henry follows the embattled (and unemployable) Armstrong to Harlem, meets gangster-nightclub owner Dutch Schultz, and reconnects with a resourceful whore who has reinvented herself as "Sister Flo" (an evangelist of the Aimee Semple McPherson variety), soon thereafter leaving Louis's employ and moving on to LA. Surviving an encounter with a Dublin hit man, Henry rides the rails during the Depression years, loses a leg along with his family (one more time, as jazzmen say), and ends up in California in 1946, schmoozing with filmmaker John Ford, who vows his next movie will tell"the real Irish story": i.e., Henry's. A surprising amount of this nonsense is quite absorbing, because Booker-winner Doyle is too lively and skilled a novelist to let it be otherwise. But Oh, Play That Thing is fatally overstuffed and chaotic. An uncharacteristic misstep in a brilliant writer's estimable career.