FROM THE LAND WHOSE CHIEF EXPORTS ARE YOUTH AND LITERATURE

Author: By Katherine A. Powers

Date: SUNDAY, March 15, 1998

Page: F4

Section: Books

The vividness of this time and these things is, I am quite sure, partly the effect of my not knowing how to read at the time. A couple of years later the most important events in my life began to take place in novels, and, for better or worse, life lost that edge of bothersome reality. The sense of raw, confounding life, unmediated by books, is palpable in Elaine Crowley's ``A Dublin Girl: Growing up in the 1930s'' (Soho, $22). This is a sad and wonderful memoir filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of a Dublin that is gone forever. Crowley's stories of her mother's aspirations, her father's infidelities, his death from tuberculosis, the family's life in one room and then in a dispiriting ``housing estate'' are etched with unusual and evocative detail, and pervaded with the sensibilities and received wisdom of an oral culture.

Dermot Healy -- whose beautiful and wrenching novel ``A Goat's Song,'' has just appeared in paperback (Harvest, $14) -- is somewhat less straightforward than Crowley in his memoir, ``The Bend for Home'' (Harcourt Brace, $24; reviewed on Page F1). Healy can't bring himself to tell his own story without getting caught up in the vexing business of memory and truth. I am perhaps missing some vital component in my brain, but that problem -- considered as a problem rather than as an element integral to a narrative -- doesn't interest me one bit. Still, the good things in this book, the humorous, moving, and poignant things, far outweigh the unnecessary ones. Altogether it is a sweet, powerful account of the life and death of Healy's father and mother, and of his part in it all. Moreover, the Ireland of the village and market town in the 1950s and '60s are magnificently resurrected through the consciousness of a boy, a young person, and a now not-so-young one -- someone who, I discern, was then and is now precisely my age.

On the other hand, ``Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman'' by Nuala O'Faolain (Holt, $21), presents so lurid a spectacle of self-esteem rampant, so blatant and self-congratulatory a depiction of liberation from the toils of Irish patriarchy, that I could scarcely finish it. Its lack of cunning and art depressed me the most. No slight is ignored, no triumph elided. And lest there be any doubt as to the greatness of the thing we hold in our hands, an afterword brings tidings that in Ireland (to our bafflement and dismay) this book ``was an instant bestseller. More than a bestseller -- an emotional episode, somehow, in public life, in Ireland.''

The most peculiar book I read in this recent binge of Irishness was ``Zulu: An Irish Journey'' by Joan Mathieu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22). The author set out to discover why Irish people emigrate, with special emphasis on Roscrea, County Tipperary, and her grandmother, and minute focus on her own random cogitations. These are usually banal, but occasionally arresting, in an incomprehensible way: ``In trying to appraise the land,'' she writes, ``it broke me apart limb by limb with a crack that began in the soles of my shoes and became holes that widened with every hour. It took me fourteen hours to learn this.'' I still have no idea what exactly went on there -- no further mention is made of having been dismembered. But the whole project really never gets off the ground. Mathieu is met with cold shoulders at every turn, and even when someone does agree to explain things to her, she is rarely happy with the result. This is a tale of dashed expectations: Even the view outside her window, which she claims to appreciate for its desolation, doesn't come up to snuff. ``You'd expect to sometimes see a red umbrella or a broken kite,'' she writes wistfully, ``but you never did.''

I have saved the real book of books for last: ``One Day as a Tiger'' by Anne Haverty (Ecco, $22) is a first novel and the best, first or otherwise, I have read in a year. So great is this work, I have offered my friends a money-back guarantee on it -- though members of the public will, I'm afraid, have to accept the risk for themselves. Set in Tipperary, it is the story of two brothers that draws from every stream of Irish writing: tales of troublesome fairies; of canny country folk up against the odd thing; of the spiritual toll exacted by the family farm; of rural suspicion and schadenfreude; of deep and terrible guilt. But above all this is a work of heroic imagination. Haverty renders the narrative through the consciousness of Marty, a young man who went off to Trinity College leaving the farm to his brother Pierce, whose vocation it is. But Marty throws up his promising student career and returns, now distressingly out of place, an affront and conundrum to others, a trial to himself as his self-loathing grows. Returning he had hoped to find the peace of the past, but instead the country seems to mock him, assuming ``the familiar bleakness of unrequited reality, while I wandered around the place like a rueful ghost, tricked and cheated.''

There is something huge and Dostoevskian in the difficult, tragic relations between the two brothers. Pierce, married to a woman with no talent or will for being a farmer's helpmeet, is too good. For his part, Marty grasps his own self-destructiveness as a virtue, finding specious justification for his badness in his insistence that he knows he is bad, that he is as irresponsible toward himself as he is toward others. The tragedy that evolves from this frame of mind is further advanced by the existence in the plot of a most unusual lamb. The creature is as weird a thing as ever came out of Ireland, and yet, incredibly, it is as eloquent a device as a novel ever had. Beyond that, it accords perfectly with my memories of Ireland's everyday strangeness.