This Side of Brightness - ISBNLookup.com

Library Journal

Called "New York's most visible up-and-coming Irish writer" by the New York Times, McCann skillfully evokes early 20th-century New York, where Irish mixed with African Americans and Italians to dig the tunnel under the East River.

David Willis McCullough

This Side of Brightness is a similarly deft feat of balance and fancy footwork. It is also a disturbingly beautiful portrait of a family whose dreams are never quite able to stave off the painful reality of their circumstances, a portrait that ends without sentimentality and yet with renewed hope.
— New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

An ambitious, idiosyncratic, moving saga of immigrant life by Irish expatriate McCann (stories: Fishing the Sloe-black River, 1996; Songdogs, 1994, etc.). Writing in a prose of considerable allusive power, McCann ingeniously uses the NYC subway as a central symbol. In 1916, the excavation of subway tunnels gives immigrant Con O'Leary a chance at a decent job, otherwise denied to recent Irish arrivals. Among his fellow "sandhogs" is Nathan Walker, a young black man also determined to secure some part of the alluring American Dream. When O'Leary dies in one of the frequent cave-ins afflicting the massive project, Walker elects to help his devastated widow and young daughter. Over the succeeding years, a complex affection draws Nathan and Con's daughter Eleanor together, and eventually, despite the considerable risks involved, they marry. In a brisk narrative spanning eight decades, McCann finds in the struggles and fates of Eleanor and Nathan's descendants a vivid outline of the experiences of outcasts and immigrants in American society. In a sharply ironic touch the subway tunnels that had been, for Con and Nathan, a way into the mainstream have become, by the 1980's, a home for those on society's far fringes. Treefrog, a homeless man who's taken shelter beneath Riverside Park, has been so worn down by his social exile that he's uncertain of his past and his own name. McCann further stresses the increasing harshness of modern life by juxtaposing his depiction of Treefrog's impoverished, hallucinatory existence against some transcendent images of the natural world, including, most memorably, a recurrent image of a flock of cranes. A poet's version of a family saga, mingling originaland persuasive imagery with a story of great dramatic impactþand an angry, convincing criticism of the manner in which American society has repeatedly frustrated the attempts of outsiders to make a home. A haunting novel, by a writer emerging as a major talent (First printing of 35,000; Book-of-the-Month alternate selection; author tour)

From the Publisher

"Disturbingly beautiful . . . A dazzling bl of menace and heartbreak." (David Willis McCullough, The New York Times Book Review)

"As luminescent as its name, resplent with dignity, this is one of the few novels in recent memory that I mourned even as I read." (Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe)

"A rarity in this cool era-the urban saga with a social conscience, employing the large canvas once used by Steinbeck and Algren." (Ambrose Clancy, The Washington Post)

"Gritty, disturbing, and powerful . . . McCann is a fiercely original talent and a major one." (Andy Solomon, San Francisco Chronicle)