Found Horizon

THE FIRST DAY OF FRIDAY by Honor Tracy. 246 pages. Random House. $4.95

A certain sort of book, like a certain sort of party, is not expected to begin on time; if you make the mistake of arriving in the first chapter, you find the author still polishing ashtrays and setting out dishes of salted nuts. But Irish farce is not a sitdown affair; it is the falling-down kind, and must begin on time or a little earlier. It is Good Intentions missing his tram and improving the hour by having a few innocent drinks with his fine friends Sedition and Salvation, and ending up, all amaze, knee-walking in the dark of the moon.

Honor Tracy, who has written the classic of modern Irish farce (her wonderfully vicarish novel, The Straight and Narrow Path), unaccountably neglects this rule in The First Day of Friday. Good Intentions is there all right (young Michael Duff, the impoverished Protestant squire who wants only to marry his Dulcie and persuade his servant Atracta to cook breakfast on time). So are Sedition and Salvation (respectively Atracta, the mindless mother of fatherless triplets, and her confessor, the insane but otherwise reasonable Father Behan). There is, furthermore, the besotted yardman Tomo who leads a bull into Michael Duff's kitchen for reasons that to him, at least, seem perfectly logical at the time.

But until well past the middle of the book, the party is dreadfully sober, bull in the kitchen and all. The funny people stand around with glasses in their hands, and the funny events occur, but the reader never feels the giddiness that good farce and a certain kind of intoxication can produce: the sensation of having temporarily mislaid the horizon and of knowing you can locate it again with no trouble if only that calf will stop licking your face.

The walls whirl satisfactorily for a few pages when Atracta, having been fired for nonfeasance of breakfast, goes to law against her former employer and for a wonderful moment seems likely to be granted a large chunk of his estate in judgment. But the whirling begins too late and stops too soon. By this time the reader has begun to suspect that, soberly observed, Irish cuteness can be annoying.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.