Older siblings Jim and Anna are virulently patriotic and virulently racist, and their children have, respectively, lost an arm and a life fighting overseas. The upstart talent is still there perhaps it has been applied too quickly. Farragan's Retreat follows a wealthy Irish-Catholic clan in Philadelphia in the context of the Vietnam War. The story doesn't hold together (or the reader's interest) as firmly as the earlier novel until the end which consists of a succession of militant retorts: Farragan's brother Jim and his wife Anna are blown up so is Father Edmund behind the altar and Farragan himself decides on his own destiny. Assorted sequences fill in the mea culpable activities of the other Farragans: their mother, gone to her rest, after deliberately sending one son to his death Father Edmund, a whiskey priest sipping Chivas Regal in a monastery Farragan's wife Muriel who has remained chaste since the birth of her twins (or so he thinks) his young mistress, Marie. Farragan's Retreat Tom McHale 3.84 32 ratings9 reviews McHale, Tom, Farragan's Retreat Genres Fiction 311 pages, Hardcover First published JanuBook details & editions About the author Tom McHale 29 books1 follower Tom McHale (1941-1982) was an American novelist from Pennyslvania. When first seen, Farragan, Arthur Farragan, is about to go off to Canada to kill his son Simon, a miscreant-draft-dodger-defector, particularly since one nephew has just returned in an unopened box and another without an arm. They lend themselves to much of this verbal and wildly excitable hassling within the hallowed confines of family and church where frequently McHale nips the shins under the cassock. 526), this takes place within the same precinct of Philadelphia's renegade irish Catholics.
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