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The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad A Mostly Irish Farce by Roger Boylan ISBN: 0-8021-4032-7 / ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4032-6 US $14.00 - 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, 464 pp - Oct. 2003 |
The hilarious follow-up to “one of the most impressive novels written by an American in recent years” (Harvey Pekar, The Austin Chronicle)
Roger Boylan’s first novel, Killoyle, established him as a brilliant successor to such Irish masters as Joyce, Beckett, and J. P. Donleavy. Now his new farce follows the hapless inhabitants of Killoyle, Ireland, through the frenetic week of the Pint-Pulling Olympiad.
After crashing into a cross-dressing church sexton, local lush Mick McCreek loses his job as a car tester and enlists lawyer Tom O’Mallet to represent him in a wrongful termination suit. But O’Mallet and the fussy librarian who hosts Mick’s unemployment seminars are not who they seem: their real gig, it turns out, is selling missiles to a splinter group of the IRA, and they’ve decided to use Mick—and another client, the hapless waiter Anil Swain—as the dicey operation’s clueless patsies. Can Anil’s sexy do-gooder cousin Rashmi prevent an attack on the Pint-Pulling Olympiad before it is too late?
In the Irish comic tradition, The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad is an invitation from a dazzling voice in American fiction to share a pint with one of the most fantastic casts of characters in recent memory. With a wink and a nudge, Boylan’s pyrotechnic prose brings to life Ireland at its manic extremes, proving the author a dazzling and distinctive talent in American fiction.