Declaring your ethnic origins makes companions - and sometimes enemies - of strangers. Shane Hegarty meets the Irish-American writer Thomas Lynch, a fond, shrewd observer of a changing Ireland
When Thomas Lynch sat down to write Booking Passage, he intended it to be quite different from how it worked out. His publisher, he says, was keen to cash in on the post-Frank McCourt boom in memoirs about the Irish in America. "It's a blockbuster mentality, of course," says Lynch, matter-of-factly. Then came the attacks of September 11th, and all that changed. A book about the forty shades of green he'd seen on the Ring of Kerry seemed "curious but idiotic" in the wake of an event that asked questions of ethnicity and religion and why we "otherise" our fellow human beings. "All I saw was forty shades of green," he writes, "and in each of them still forty more."
"Most Americans live in this blinkered world where we don't see the implications; we think we're constantly innocent," he says over a pot of tea in a Galway hotel. "So that kind of faith-and-begorrah 'Oirishness' that we all holler once or twice a year, we thought, is entirely benign. There's no undercurrent to it. You can't poison the well."
Lynch has a house in Moveen, in west Co Clare, and a funeral home in Michigan, and it was from this twin perspective that his assessment of Irish-Americans became something of a reassessment of his own sense of belonging. That hyphen in his ethnicity not only identified him as Irish-American but also identified what he was not.
"One of the things about being an Irish-American or an Asian-American or a Hispanic-American is that ethnicity makes companions of strangers. So if someone in west Clare turns up some place in the Bronx, there will be an infrastructure in place where there will already be somewhere to sleep. Which is a very good thing.
"But the other thing is that it makes enemies of us. Every time I play my ethnic card I'm playing it against everyone else in a sense. So where do you find the balance? Where do you take pride in what you are and not only tolerate but celebrate what is unique and different about other tribes?"
Booking Passage is an attempt to answer these questions that goes beyond the cliches, stereotypes and cosy romance of so much Irish-Americana. It's clear that he loves this country, has that deep affinity for this land that is particular to emigrants and that can pick up intensity through the generations. This Lynch is third generation, but his accent carries a lilt gained from repeated visits, and his language carries the colloquialisms. His writing, too, has always been earthy and poetic, influenced partly by his roots but also by his day job as a funeral director. Here he repeats the intelligence, beauty, humour and poignancy that made The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade so well regarded, not least by Alan Ball, the creator of the cult television series Six Feet Under.
He wanted to call the book The Same but Different, the phrase thrown at him by his aunt Nora Lynch, who was the last thread between Co Clare and Michigan and whose cottage her nephew now owns, but it is not a common phrase in the US. Still, it sums up so much for him. "How is it that we are different? How is it we are all one of a kind, but one of a kind? It is the same sentence but just depends on which you emphasise. So we should be able to nod to one another's uniqueness, the special place in the world. By the same token, we have to acknowledge we're all in this together." It is of particular concern to him in an age in which "as a white male American I am automatically in the dominant culture. I am genderwise, racewise. I trump everything. Whereas all the Irish sensibilities run contrary to that. The Irish were never of the top drawer."
He has become a critic of what he calls the "bring it on" mentality of US politicians, especially of George W Bush. The reaction to September 11th in Ireland was, says Lynch, in some respects stronger than it was in the US, a "tears-out-of-the-eyeball kind of reaction, raw humanity".
In his essays on religion, land, property, politics and the way emigration could separate families in ways that went beyond mere geography, he also observes a changing Ireland. He is far less critical of how the country has coped with change than most of its natives are, and he admires our leap into prosperity. "I think there's an advantage in Ireland, because you didn't do the industrial revolution, so the shift from agriculture to technology seems seamless here. They're both cottage industries that rely on personal imagination. And it seems to work well here. That punch-the-clock sort of mentality never seemed to work here."
These days the hyphenation is being inverted. Immigrants are becoming Polish-Irish or Nigerian-Irish, and we should be able to recognise the process, to see how it mirrors our experience. "My grandfather would not have identified himself as an Irish-American," says Lynch. "He would have insisted he was American. What he would have been saying is, 'I'm part of a successful culture,' because my father had to leave his country because he couldn't feed himself. And I'm sure there are eastern Europeans now coming here with the same sort of institutional shame of having come from a place that couldn't take care of its own. And yet, the same way the Irish did, they romanticise about this old place. And not without good reasons."
In Booking Passage, Lynch describes the day his brother first came to Ireland and was overwhelmed by the intensity of arriving "home", literally brought to his knees by it. In an age when emigration is no longer necessary, though, when people do not leave never to return, surely there will be a dilution of that yearning for the homeland. Lynch doesn't believe so. "I still think there is a sense of understanding; when you get to a place there is a launch code; the tumblers click into place and you say, 'Oh, now I get it.' "
Death features in the book, too, unsurprisingly for someone so intimate with it. He remains a practising funeral director (preferred, it seems, to "undertaker"). The family firm, started by his grandfather, remains strong. "Mortality is like punctuation, you know. My sense is that good funerals are a kind of narrative. But it's a more interesting narrative than the one involving selling real estate or being an orthodontist. Not to say that there aren't some really interesting orthodontists," he laughs.
"You know, we die. For me, it has been interesting being around people when they are pressed up against these realities; that has been interesting all along. I didn't go into funeral service because I wanted to play at the deep end of the pool, as we say. I really admired my father. I needed a job, and when I did it I found immediately that people really felt I'd done them a kindness, when all I did was show up. I wasn't doing brain surgery. I was embalming bodies, putting them in boxes, taking them to church. But the sense of gratitude that people had was very seductive." He still does it because it makes him "feel necessary" and because he sees things an orthodontist does not. "I do think it has made me a better writer. And I think being a writer has made me a better funeral director. Because I had to listen closely to what people say."
Some time back, Alan Ball e-mailed him to announce that he had finally figured out the formula for dramatic success. He told Lynch, "I know you've understood this all along, but once you put a dead guy in a room, you can talk about anything." The Irish wake, says Lynch, is based on this neat equation. "They don't have to name it 'a celebration of life'. They can laugh and cry in the same room, and nobody gets nervous. The Irish can do both. The British can't. And it's not just British, it's the culture at large says you shouldn't. Because the Americans are the same. Either we're going to have this performance-based funeral, 'who put the fun in funeral', or we're going to have one of those old morbid traditional ones. And the Irish tradition is to do both those things and to do them both really well."
Would he ever consider giving up death to come and live here? "I'd like to be here more than I have. My hope is, as my sons and daughters take over more of the business, that I can do that. My wife loves it here, but she loves it in warm places, too. So I guess what I'd like to do is two or three months in the spring, two or three months in the fall. It's nice then out Kilkee way, after they've made their money. 'Roll on September,' they say once all the visitors are gone. That's a good time to be in the west. The light is very good. I could see that happening. But I don't see a retirement to here. I'm a funeral director. We don't retire, you know. We get taken out by our ankles."
Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans, by Thomas Lynch, is published by Jonathan Cape, £12.99