Thomas Murphy: A Novel

by Roger Rosenblatt

Overview

The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction with this reflective, bittersweet tale that introduces the irrepressible aging poet Thomas Murphy—a paean to the mystery, tragedy and wonder of life.

Trying his best to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist his only child, Máire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphy—singer of the oldies, friend of the down-and-out, card sharp, raconteur, piano bar player, bon vivant, tough and honest and all-around good guy—contemplates his sunset years. Máire worries that Murph is losing his memory. Murph wonders what to do with the rest of his life. The older mind is at issue, and Murph’s jumps from fact to memory to fancy, conjuring the islands that have shaped him—Inishmaan, a rocky gumdrop off the Irish coast where he was born, and New York, his longtime home. He muses on the living, his daughter and precocious grandson William, and on the dead, his dear wife Oona, and Greenberg, his best friend. Now, into Murphy’s world comes the lovely Sarah, a blind woman less than half his age, who sees into his heart, as he sees into hers. Brought together under the most unlikely circumstance, Murph and Sarah begin in friendship and wind up in impossible possible love.

An Irishman, a dreamer, a poet, Murph, like Whitman, sings lustily of himself and of everyone. Through his often-extravagant behavior and observations, both hilarious and profound, we see the world in all its strange glory, equally beautiful and ridiculous. With memory at the center of his thoughts, he contemplates its power and accuracy and meaning. Our life begins in dreams, but does not stay with them, Murph reminds us. What use shall we make of the past? Ultimately, he asks, are relationships our noblest reason for living?

Behold the charming, wistful, vibrant, aging Thomas Murphy, whose story celebrates the ageless confusion that is this dreadful, gorgeous life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062394576
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,165,262
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Roger Rosenblatt  is the author of six off-Broadway plays and eighteen books, including Lapham Rising, Making Toast, Kayak Morning and The Boy Detective. He is the recipient of the 2015 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.

Editorial Reviews

Aging poet Thomas Murphy, whose memory isn’t what it used to be, looks back on his colorful life.

USA Today

Rosenblatt, essayist, memoirist and fiction writer, has created a memorable character with a magnetic personality. There is a wondrous fluidity to his prose. Thomas Murphy is a eulogy to a man who has followed his own rules and who has learned to live with his deepest regrets.

Washington Post

Even when the poems aren’t coming, Murphy is a delight to listen to.

Wall Street Journal

In this superb, slim novel, Rosenblatt delivers shrewd and funny observations about always going’full tilt,’ no matter what life throws at you as you age.

People

This is the sort of novel you mark up with pleasurable abandon, so that you can read passages aloud later to someone else... Thomas Murphy is so well written, it was difficult not to.

East Hampton Star

Thomas Murphy is a joyous ode to language as it gropes to give voice to the ineffable

Newsday

Rosenblatt, essayist, memoirist and fiction writer, has created a memorable character with a magnetic personality. There is a wondrous fluidity to his prose. Thomas Murphy is a eulogy to a man who has followed his own rules and who has learned to live with his deepest regrets.

Washington Post

Rosenblatt has always demonstrated an affection for the play of words on the page, and in Murphy he’s created the perfect character to showcase that facility for language... a rewarding journey.

BookPage

Some novels delight their readers with an intricate and irresistible plot…Others are wonderful at evoking a time, a place, an emotion. Still others are notable primarily for the way the author creates unforgettable characters—beings so real, so complex, so absorbing that you think about them long after you finish the book, and you cannot quite believe they will no longer be holding your attention, provoking that startled pang of understanding and fellow feeling. This last feat, the unforgettable character, is the prime virtue of Roger Rosenblatt's novel Thomas Murphy, for the aging poet who gives the book its name…is the novel…Rosenblatt's accomplishment is to draw the reader so completely into Murphy's mind and heart and memory, so thoroughly into the poet's amused (and sometimes bemused) consciousness, that the minimal plot and even less action are rarely cause for complaint.

The New York Times Book Review - Brian Doyle

11/02/2015
Rosenblatt (Making Toast) tackles memory loss with a fictional portrait of a septuagenarian poet whose “wonderful brain” is “ebbing a bit.” Thomas Murphy jokes, drinks, sings oldies, and wonders what he’ll be doing the rest of his life in a funny, touching narrative that begins and ends with the question, “Have I told you about this?” Born off the Irish coast on Inishmaan, population 160, Murph now resides on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. He teaches writing to the homeless and enjoys being a grandfather, but remains at loose ends following his wife’s death. Daughter Maire drags him to a doctor after he sets off fire alarms when he forgets eggs boiling on the stove. He cannot remember the term smoke detector, or his New York area code. He wisecracks his way through the medical examination, fooling no one. Afterward, a chance encounter at a bar leads Murph to an opportunity for a new beginning: there he finds Sarah, a blind woman, who provides a rare connection—someone he understands and someone who understands him. Murph’s rambling monologue reveals discernment and feeling, as a favorite George Eliot quote puts it, especially in riffs on poetry, regret, cooking, and the upside of forgetting. Smart as a whip, dumb as a post, and frail as pebbles, forgetful Murph proves a memorable hero as he faces his last years as though he won’t crash if he goes full tilt. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Rosenblatt’s accomplishment is to draw the reader so completely into Murphy’s mind and heart and memory, so thoroughly into the poet’s amused (and sometimes bemused) consciousness…the writing soars and you are grateful for the fine writer who puts poetry in Murphy’s mouth.

New York Times Book Review

There are no dips or lags in tempo in this novel... Thomas Murphy is a eulogy to a man who has followed his own rules and who has learned to live with his deepest regrets.

Seattle Times

Even when the poems aren’t coming, Murphy is a delight to listen to.

Wall Street Journal

Aging poet Thomas Murphy, whose memory isn’t what it used to be, looks back on his colorful life.

USA Today

2015-10-15
An elderly poet delivers a chatty, comic monologue on sex, death, life, and getting the girl. Rosenblatt—admired for his essays for Time and PBS Frontline and for his more recent memoirs such as Making Toast (2010)—likes an occasional dip into fiction. His first venture, Lapham Rising (2006), centered on a half-mad misanthrope fighting McMansions on Long Island. His new book features a cranky/lovable widower awaiting the verdict of dementia tests. Like Tom Sawyer imagining his own funeral, Thomas Murphy envisions his own obit mentioning "his heavenly baritone voice and sea-blue eyes" and pegging him as "the celebrated poet, genius, cardsharp, pop singer, piano bar player, raconteur, bon vivant, and all-around good guy." The novel is all character, teetering on the verge of caricature—the Irish-born Murph drinks and sings loudly, usually "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" His New York liberal bona fides are so airtight that he teaches creative writing to the homeless. He sat down, he tells us, for civil rights at a Woolworth's in the 1960s. Rosenblatt spools out this tale without chapters, just fragments that mimic a skittering mind. (The first and last sentences are "Have I told you about this?") No one else speaks, although the pages are thick with quotations. A plot is barely there,and wheezes with the appearance of a comely young blind woman who might take the old dude to bed—shades of the Sidney Poitier-inflected moralism of "A Patch of Blue." The book is better rattling around in the mind of the old fellow, who conjures a vivid childhood on an island in the Irish Sea and writes drafts here of a couple of decent poems. All the while, readers are subjected to such pointedly "lovable" nonsense as "you never crash if you go full tilt" and a bushel full of puns. Here is Murph, going over his prize acceptance speech in the back of a taxi: "delighting in its wit and flow, its mixing of sincerity and self-effacement, the warming anecdote, the dip into a pun, the soar into high seriousness here and there, a splash of poetry, a flash of skin." A generous assessment of the novel itself. A colorful man nears his demise with a bit o' philosophizing and a song.

Kirkus Reviews

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