The banyan tree : a novel /

Nolan succeeds in creating an extraordinary novel of a very ordinary woman, 85-year-old Minnie O'Brien. Nolan is Joycean in his ability to take quiet everyday events and make them vibrant and moving. The novel opens with Minnie churning milk, a strenuous weekly chore that the author uses to foreshadow Minnie's aloneness and the need to reach out to her children for comfort and companionship. Through flashbacks we see her happy and loving marriage with Peter that overcame the sexual repression of their Catholic faith, and the birth of their three children. Minnie's children do not love the Irish farmland as she does, and as they come of age they each are drawn beyond Ireland. The flashbacks, full of folklore and the joy of the simple pleasures in life, are the strengths of this novel, along with the main character herself, a hardworking, loving, and stubborn woman. This is a moving tale that explores the Irish countryside through the changes of the twentieth century. (Reviewed March 15, 2000)1559705116Michelle Kaske

Nolan's sensitive prose and Shaw's rum-raisin voice, which does so well in capturing the story's hardscrabble lives and tender diversions, combine to make this audio reading a consummate achievement. Nolan (Under the Eye of the Clock) tells the life of Minnie O'Brien, an Irish woman whose affectionate husband dies relatively young, leaving her to care for the family's farm. Their three children all seek their fortunes elsewhere, but Minnie holds out hope that her youngest, Frankie, will return to work his parents' land. It's for him that Minnie struggles to run the farm and keep it from Jude Fortune, her avaricious neighbor. Focusing on the simple trials and pleasures of pastoral life, Nolan imbues his characters and scenes with wit and vitality. Actress Shaw (Persuasion, etc.) gives the reading an Irish lilt, easily rendering Nolan's Joycean flourishes and slipping into a subtle brogue in the book's sparse dialogue. Although eventually Minnie discovers a family secret and, later, Frankie races to make it home before his mother's death, it's really in simpler things, such as a hypnotic description--and narrating--of churning butter, that this book's magic lies. Based on the Arcade hardcover (Forecasts, Feb. 7). (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The Banyan Tree ($25.95; Mar.; 384 pp.; 1-55970-511-6): Irish writer Nolan, a lifelong quadriplegic and mute whose struggles to be a part of the life around him and express himself were recorded in his prizewinning 1978 memoir Under the Eye of the Clock, has now, after 12 quite literally painstaking years, produced this spectacularly vivid and lyrical first novel. Its subject is an elderly woman's life alone on the farm she labors to maintain after her husband has died and their adult children long since left home. Minnie Humphreys is a marvelously observed character, and the language with which Nolan records both her daily tasks and her extended flights of memories of earlier times is charged with fresh metaphors (Minnie's ``cries . . . [go] cartwheeling around the room''), ingenious usages (``Sunday'' as a verb), and catapulting sensory impressions. Nolan's is essentially a sacramental view of even the humblest points at which the human, natural, and imagined worlds intersect (halfechoes--probably coincidental ones--of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems are frequently heard in his tumbling sentences), and his first fiction offers the exhilaration and instruction of viewing ``everyday'' things from an utterly fresh perspective. A triumph, it goes without saying--and a work of truly individual genius. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.