Almost There [Paperback]

Readers of AYS who were swept up by the intimacy and energy of O'Faolain's voice, the unvarnished honesty of her brutal stories of childhood, her hard-won place in Irish journalism and her ongoing, episodic search for love, will find the same frank passion in this second book. Written after the success of AYS and her first novel, "My Dream of You," "Almost There" muses on the changes acclaim has brought - financial security, prestige, Italian holidays and writing sojourns in Manhattan. She describes the writing of the novel and the lover she had at the time - nearly illiterate, married, elderly and secretive - with a clear-eyed distance that combines rueful, wry self-knowledge with raw passion. She shows where she borrowed from real life for her fiction, she tells how AYS affected relationships with friends and old lovers, whose versions differed, sometimes, sharply, with her own. "I hadn't realized before I wrote AYS that I for one need constantly to relearn a simple thing - that I do not understand other people as they understand themselves."

There's a great deal in this vein, how "the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written." And there are the things that haven't changed - a deep vein of self-perpetuating loneliness, and, in contrast, an optimistic certainty of her capacity to change. And in the end, she leaves us curious, as she did at the end of AYS - does she work things out with her lover's child? Does she persevere this time?

And there's much reflection on age, on how the shortness of time reduces options. Nothing earth-shattering there, but O'Faolain's breath-catching fierceness makes it feel fresh. Fans will love this book and hope for another installment. Newcomers I'm less sure of. There's so much that reflects and illuminates her previous books that new readers will either search those out immediately or lose interest halfway through this one. Cranky, acerbic, sometimes pathetic, O'Faolain possesses the ardor of youth and the (sometimes) wisdom of age.

Subtitled "The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman," ALMOST THERE could just as easily have been titled "The Inward Journey of a Dublin Woman." O'Faolain writes in the best tradition of her Irish predecessors. Rarely sentimental or sappy, she pauses at moments in her life to reflect, to share snapshots of her history with more than just a beautifully descriptive narrative. She offers feeling that is raw, honest and often painful to read. Her story, exposed in the two volumes, is an inward look, a rich and insightful recollection of a life sometimes lonely, sometimes disappointing --- and all tied together in often lyrical language, reminiscent of her native tongue and the magic of her homeland. And lest I forget, she wields a national irreverence, a sometimes dark sense of humor so resonant of the Irish.

In ALMOST THERE, O'Faolain retells the six years that have passed since her first memoir, while going back in time on occasion to incidents that helped to inform her present self. She finds in her later years that there are still lessons to be learned from earlier moments, even from earlier gaps: "...there had been great holes in my ordinary knowledge of the world. Some very simple things have been late discoveries, which is a reward, in a way, for having lived wrong. A lot of people who were better at managing life begin to find it dull at this age."

But for O'Faolain, middle age, albeit trying, is a time of discovery --- friendship, for instance. It is in her mid-fifties when she realizes that she needs to create a "circle" about herself. She finds love again and marvels at it as if it were the first time. She compares middle age to being a teenager again: "Middle age is the least talked about of all the seasons of life, and yet it is the most exacting. It is adolescence come again at the other side of adulthood - its other bookend - in its uneasiness of identity, its physical surprises, and the strengths it takes to handle it."

O'Faolain has the unmistakable voice of generations of her countrymen and women. Impassioned and pained, exhausted and rejuvenated, she writes from a heart swelled by the mourning of the passage of time and tempered by the glorious anticipation of times ahead. I can hardly wait for the third installment of her life.

--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara