Inspired by westerns and stories told by the “returned Yanks” scattered around late 1950s rural Ireland, Fintan Doherty sets out for America a few years after the death of his mother.
Way Out West absorbs the reader’s attention the way such a tale might and, without noticing, pages and years of Doherty’s life flicker past as he drifts through the 1970s and ‘80s, through girlfriends and drinking buddies, and through towns and cities that are “all non-stop, everything in motion” whirls of Americana.
Never travelling in a straight line, he washes up first in Cleveland, then onwards to St Louis where he takes a job with social services, then Wisconsin where he works shortchanging punters at a neon-hued carnival, onward to Butte with its storied history of Irish labourers and eventually to California.
It is in that unspoken, arguably unspeakable search for identity that Way Out West defines itself. Because something has always been missing for Doherty, something rooted in the opening 60 pages about his childhood in the glen. And though it takes him a lifetime to reach it, the destination, when he arrives, does not just justify the journey, it offers serenity to the wanderer and the reader alike.
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