Rockaway Blue, by Larry Kirwan
It's almost three years after the 9/11 attacks, and the Murphy family remains in turmoil.
Police Lt. Brian Murphy lies in his grave. His widow Rose and young son Liam remain lost in their big house by the ocean, unable to live up to the memory of the man who is revered as a martyred hero. His younger brother Kevin, a firefighter, still lives and works in his Rockaway neighborhood, fending off adulthood and his brother's shadow.
Into this steps Kirwan, himself an Irish emigrant who moved to New York in the 1970s, and lived the authentic immigrant experience.
Kirwan is a polymath. He's a singer and songwriter, the founder and force of the Irish American rock band Black 47. He's a playwright and novelist. He wrote Paradise Square, a musical about the convergence of Irish and African music in the mid-19th Century, which is opening in Chicago. He is the host of Celtic Crush, a widely popular radio program on SiriusXM.
In Rockaway, Kirwan wants to write of the Irish community's falling apart, losing its ethnic sense, and no longer dominating the city's police and fire brigades. But the overwhelming novel tries to do too much. Its themes run the gamut -- questions of faith and family, of community and identity, of the changing definitions of manhood and womanhood, of love and marriage, of the shifting cultures, even of the rivalry between the Mets and the Yankees.
Still, it centers around a single, burning question: Why was Brian -- who died a hero because he ran back inside after leading people to safety -- at the World Trade Center before the first plane hit? Detective Sgt. Murphy's unofficial investigation raises the hackles of his former tribe as he delves into the issues described above. and his efforts at easing his family's guilt and heartbreak sometimes makes them worse.
It's an uneasy tension that careens through the book, showing that life, tragedy, and death isn't always as clear-cut as it seems.
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