IRISH CREAM.

The Banyan Tree
Christopher Nolan
Arcade Publishing, $25.95, 374 pp.

This is the third book, and undoubtedly the best, by an extraordinary author who has conquered extreme difficulty in order to write. Christopher Nolan is mute and a paraplegic. This novel took him thirteen years to finish. He writes by having his head held as he taps at a typewriter with a stick attached to his forehead. Nevertheless, as if bursting out of the bonds of his disability, his prose pours out--lush, exuberant, and evocative.

The story is a simple one--the life of Minnie O'Brien on a small Irish farm. It opens with the weekly churning of butter and the language of its description is mesmerizing:

   Nursing still their helium harvest the cataracted crocks waited, still
   playing their stoic games, but the moment they were lifted up they yielded
   up their booty, listening in awe as their clotted cream dropped ploppingly
   down into the cold, damp coffin of dankness. There it lay fooling itself
   that it might yet escape but then snapped the lid, snap went the clamps,
   and up the churn was hoisted onto its stand. There in total darkness the
   cream lay while the churn hung where it sung, while Minnie geared herself
   up for the imponderables ahead.

Nolan's prose has been called Joycean and passages like this give reason to the claim.

Minnie, nee Humphries, has left service in her father's shop to marry Peter O'Brien. After an idyllic honeymoon in Dublin, "the city of just about right," they return to Drumhollow to farm their five fields and do the daily chores. They milk the cows, feed the calves, slop the pigs, and check the roosting hens before sitting down to tea in their own kitchen. Day follows day. She learns to help with the peat harvest, "'Now his slean swung toward her, and yielding him a catcher's grasp she clutched his sod, swung round and slapped it down onto the slatted barrow." And she learns to understand and cheer his game of hurling.

Incident after incident is fraught with luminous detail and fresh insights. The very ordinariness of the story is transformed by the language. Minnie and Peter have three children. The oldest is already ordained a priest and the daughter become a nurse when Peter succumbs to the heart condition he has kept secret. And shortly thereafter Minnie's youngest son Frankie leaves her to set out on his own.

Oddly enough the most absorbing part of the novel is Minnie's struggle with loneliness after her husband dies and her children leave Drumhollow one by one. Year after year she soldiers on with the farm work while Brendan, now a bishop, struggles with doubt and alcoholism in New York, Sheila lives in a loveless marriage, and Frankie, her favorite, goes his lone wild way in Australia. Stubbornly holding to her belief that Frankie will return to farm the five fields and the family will be reunited, she lives out her days in Drumhollow. There are emotion and intensity in the telling of the final part of Minnie's life but no real disappointment because of its truth to life. Readers will be held by the language to the very end:

   A clay crate before her, a clay crate behind her, clay in every Stygian
   stitch of the vacancy in the hole where she now lay, and lingering, the
   crowd gathered at the graveside waited the final decade for decoration at
   the end, as green grass the clay waited to grow, the earthworms to fodder,
   there in Drumhollow graveyard, where woman of women all, the
   Fenian-heart-stopper Minnie Humphries-that-was joined her
   husband-that-used-to-be for ever and ever, amen.

Abigail McCarthy, a longtime Commonweal contributor, lives in Washington, D.C.