Jamie Mangan, left at 36 by his wife and then suddenly left all her money, takes it into his heart to go off from New York to Ireland to find out whether or not he is the great-great-grandson of the poet James Clarence Mangan. Jamie's father had once halfheartedly tried this, but he wasn't prey to a sufficiently insatiable hunger for the quest. But then it is Jamie, not his father, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in an heirloom daguerrotype which has 'J.M. 1847?' on the back of it. The resemblance - a newly missing tooth, for instance - eerily increases once Jamie is in Ireland, entangled with disreputable Mangans who are probably his cousins (ah, how treacherously and sluttishly lovely, and how erotically practised, is 18-year-old Kathleen Mangan), and likewise with respectable Mangans who are very guarded (and what are they guarding?). Jamie starts to sense that the daguerrotype is not so much a passport to a past world as a death-warrant in a present world.

LRB 6 December 1979 | PDF Download