Fiction: Anne Haverty's latest novel, her third, is woven around a subtle reworking of a well-known literary archetype: the returned Yank.
Irish writers' fetish for exile has ensured a steady supply of such figures, from Dan Ruddy in Shan Bullock's Dan the Dollar, to James Madden in Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, to Michael Ridge in Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming.
Many are shown to be responding to the siren call of emigrant nostalgia. Having failed to realise the American dream, they seek sanctuary in a romanticised Ireland, only to be reminded of the real reasons why they first left, and must do so again. The Free and Easy gives a sardonic contemporary twist to this motif. Here, the return of the "migrant" is the occasion for a send-up of outdated Irish-American attitudes to the "old country" and a sustained satire on a money-obsessed Irish society.
The opening chapter introduces us to Pender Gast, a tough-minded tycoon who embodies the American dream. As Paddy Pendergast, he fled Ireland as a boy, carrying with him a fierce resolve to expunge all traces of a place he associates with misery and death. In old age, however, he becomes haunted by a recurring dream in which a crowd of famished creatures beseech him for help. Convinced that the Irish race is "dying out for want of sustenance", Gast attempts to exorcise his ghosts by proxy. Rather than return himself, he dispatches his grand-nephew, Tom Blessman, to Dublin with a generous bank account and instructions to give the Irish whatever it is they want.
On arrival, Blessman, for whom anywhere abroad is "little more than a botched simulacrum of the US", scans the newspapers in "the furtive and shameful hope of finding stories of famine and upheaval in the country districts". Instead, he discovers a city thronged with sleek sophisticates whose only perceptible gauntness is due "not to hunger but to the low-fat regimes and gymwork of the western urban dweller". He also glimpses the menacing presence of an excluded underclass and realises that Dublin is not immune from the "swish savagery of twenty-first century life".
Blessman has his own reasons for being in Ireland; it was where his mother died when he was an infant. His desire to discover the truth about her leads him to the Kinane sisters, each of whom is a cipher for different aspects of the metropolitan lifestyles and attitudes of the new Dubliners: Dol, the ambitious gallery director; Frog, the pseudo-rebellious artist; Eimear, the regressively romantic heritage promoter; and Eileen, the "half urchin, half goddess" who is destined to become Blessman's femme fatale.
Through the Kinanes, Blessman encounters other emblematic types, including Etchen MacAnar, a charismatic politician whose claim that Irish society is "in a state of want" resonates with Gast's interpretation of his dream. MacAnar's insistence on the need to return to traditional values makes him a hero to Eimear, whose company, Heritage Unlimited, is concerned with "nothing less than the preservation, and when necessary the re-invention, of Old Ireland". Both stand in symbolic opposition to those who want to jettison the past, among them the corrupt businessman Gibbon Fitzgibbon and his glamorous wife Seoda, who tells Tom: "Ireland as we know it - and let's thank whoever or whatever - was born some time around nineteen ninety-four".
While Haverty effectively exploits Blessman's outsider perspective to ridicule the egotism, opportunism and venality of the Dublin nouveau riches, character development and psychological depth are too often sacrificed to the desire to highlight moral and spiritual deficiencies. There are times, too, when Tom's naivety stretches credulity and his American cadences falter, a surprising lapse considering Haverty's finely-judged ventriloquisation of Sarah Walker in her previous novel, The Far Side of a Kiss.
Yet The Free and Easy consistently entertains in its gentle mockery of a society where money is king and golf is god. At one point Tom wryly notes the fashion among "the forward-looking" for removing the ceilings of their mansions: "So many lids had been taken off, culturally speaking, there was nothing left to uncover. So they were taking the lids off their rooms". Later, he is buttonholed by a would-be entrepreneur who has an idea for a revolutionary new cream which promises the "platonic face".
Originality, he insists, is the last thing a woman wants: "No, what she's after is the Hollywood face. A composite of, mind you. No one's face in particular". As a metaphor for the slavish embrace of blandness and homogeneity it hits its target with a precise ironic charge.
The Free and Easy, By Anne Haverty, Chatto & Windus, 281pp. £11.99
Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester. His Ireland Beyond Boundaries: Mapping Irish Studies in the Twenty-first Century, co-edited with Yvonne Whelan, will be published later this year by the Pluto Press