The breaking and reshaping of family bonds are the real business of the second volume of Adrian Kenny's autobiography. Middle-class gentility, evasion of pain and passion and a clinging to security - all fall under the withering gaze of the struggling young writer.
There are scenes of family reunions in The Family Business which are as subtle and savage as anything written by magisterial chroniclers of the family such as Joyce. In Kenny's vision, the hackneyed chatter of family serves both to smother and to fuel the spark of individuality - the family is a veritable Laingean laboratory of suppression, elision and misunderstanding.
Fascination with the bite of Kenny's writing gives way to embarrassment and almost distaste for his exposure of family skeletons. But the author doesn't spare himself. The Family Business is a portrait of a hopelessly naive rebel against the stifling mores of middle-class Dublin who makes peace eventually with his own and his family's frailties by embracing marriage. Not an end to the family business then, but a new beginning.
En route to this settling of accounts, we meet a motley cast of characters as Kenny explores literary bohemia in Dublin in the 1970s, the gay society of the period, and relationships with women. Kenny tells a messy and revealing tale of doubts, failures and hesitations in finding his sexual identity.
There are cadences and patterns in this memoir which give it the flavour of fiction, but no matter. The sharpness and humour of the writing win out. A hapless innocent in love with literature nearly 30 years ago, Kenny is now a crafty practitioner.
Jack Hanna is an author and journalist