St. Patrick's Day

"If you crack open St. Patrick's Day, prepare for a stream-of-consciousness trip around Dublin's Grosvenor Square, with plenty of stops in pubs and parties. The reader is put in the mid of author Thomas McGonigle—both Thomas then and Thomas now. He intentionally obscures when the book takes place." —South Bend Tribune

"True to the self-revealing character of stream-of-consciousness, what you see is what you get with Tom. And other characters, whatever their status, are just as much mixed bags and passers-by as he is. No particular distinction or merit inheres in being a local, a native, a national. . . . But if in its simultaneous combinations and dislocations, its momentariness and recollection, St. Patrick’s Day provokes, in the long run it’s worth it. We could do with a bit more provocation." —Dublin Review of Books

“‘St. Patrick’s Day, another day in Dublin,” said one of Ireland’s leading poets, “gives the ‘Irish Novel’ a long outstanding and much-deserved kick up the arse into the 21st century. I praise the work mightily.” At least—as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill doesn’t write in English—that’s the translation. And she further offered in the Irish language: “This is first-rate prose. From the evidence of both this book and his previously published novel ‘The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov,’ we realize we are in the presence of a great novelist in Thomas McGonigle. He puts a certain period of Dublin literary history before our eyes with freshness and honesty.’” —The Irish Echo

“This succinct multi-layered satire with Horatio-Alger ending pokes fun at the American Dream as well as the American-Irish Postcard Dream. The novel reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s early satiric novel, Murphy, as well as Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, yet McGonigle’s voice and style remains uniquely his own.This book is an important literary landmark. . . . It’s time America caught up to Thomas McGonigle. . . . St. Patrick’s Day is that rare novel that must be read with attention to stylistic shifts and an alert sense of humour.” —The Millbrook Independent

“Such is the difference in scope between Joyce’s project and McGonigle’s. Joyce’s focus was global, and his ambition was nothing less than resuscitating a culture that was perhaps on its final death knell before the unforeseen Easter Rising of 1916. McGonigle has fashioned a much more personal task for his narrator, remembering rather than creating history on new terms.” —American Book Review

"Saint Patrick's Day tells the story of one 'Tom McGonigle' and follows him as he wakes up on St. Patrick's Day, journeys through various drinking establishments, and interacts with the characters he meets along the way; so, what you get is a psychologically close rendering of a single man existing after the death of his father, as he drinks away his bequeathed inheritance. . . . The seeming lack of an awakening by 'Tom McGonigle' in St. Patrick's Day affects the reader in much the same way that waiting for the arrival of Godot in Samuel Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot affects its readers." —The Hollins Critic

“[St. Patrick’s Day] deals with the larger issues of memory and loss, nationalism and identity, and language and meaning that so motivate Ulysses. . . . Mixed in with [McGonigle’s] memories of awkwardness, pain, and imagined ecstasy are musings on Irish culture and history, particularly the literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s.” —James Joyce Quarterly

“The novel reminds natives and tourists alike of the stone against which Irish identity is repeatedly hammered.” —American Book Review

“The journey through the parties and pubs is also a rich account of Dublin life . . . And that, along with the work’s associations of Joyce’s writings, and brief references to Yeats, Pound, Julien Green, Jack Spicer, Allen Ginsberg, and other writers along the way, provides this book with an emotional heft that pulls the reader through its pages and . . . helps him to care for the narrator.” —Rain Taxi Review of Books

“It’s surprising that more fiction has not been written about our national festival. Here an Irish-American author recounts a young Irish-American’s misadventures on a particular St. Patrick’ Day in Dublin.” —Books Ireland

St. Patrick’s Day is a strandentwining tale. With pithy reflections, elegant prose, and moments of penetrating insight into modern Irish society, McGonighe takes the reader on a sodden journey of Dublin all the while studying its claims to a literary landscape and the uncanny familiarity of geographical memories.”—braec: A digital Journal of Irish Studies.

“A novel full of passion, humor, & insight, which makes the reader the author’s accomplice, a witness to his heartfelt memorial to the fraught love affair between ancestors & generations.” —Foreword Reviews

“A retrospective portrait of a young Irish American in Dublin, St. Patrick’s Day combines the acute vision of the best fictional memoirs from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.” —The New York Review of Books