The Edge of Sadness
by Edwin O'Connor
Summary
Father Hugh Kennedy narrates, and he is not a man in the middle of a crisis. He has already had it. He drank, for years, badly enough that the diocese sent him away for treatment to a house that exists for priests who cannot stop, and he came back four years later to a parish nobody else wanted: Old St Paul's, in a district his city has finished with, where the congregation is small and poor and the young assistant would rather be somewhere else.
Then Charlie Carmody, who is eighty one and rich and has known Hugh since boyhood, invites him to a birthday party, and the Carmody family closes around him again. Charlie is a landlord who tells jokes while he turns the knife. His son John is a priest too, funny and furious and stalled in a parish that gives him no peace. His daughter Helen once mattered to Hugh a great deal.
Very little happens. The novel is conversation, mostly, and Hugh's careful account of what he notices and what he decides not to say, and the plot when it arrives is domestic and quiet and turns on a misunderstanding about what Charlie wanted from him.
Around four hundred and sixty pages, unhurried and often very funny, with the loneliness of a working priest at its centre rather than any question of belief.
Best for readers who want the interior life of a parish taken seriously, and a narrator whose reliability about himself is the real subject. Readers who need incident should consider themselves warned.
Historical Context & Significance
The Edge of Sadness won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and then went out of print for decades.
Edwin O'Connor was the leading novelist of Irish Catholic Boston, best known for The Last Hurrah in 1956, a study of an old style city boss that John Ford filmed with Spencer Tracy. He died in 1968 at forty nine.
The book's disappearance had less to do with quality than with timing. It arrived on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, and a novel steeped in the assumptions of the American parish before that council, the Latin Mass, the rectory, the pastor's absolute authority, read within a few years as a report from a world that had been rearranged.
Loyola Press brought it back in 2005 with an introduction by the novelist Ron Hansen, and Cluny Media has kept it available since. Critics who know both books now tend to rate this one above The Last Hurrah, which reverses the position held in O'Connor's lifetime.