We need a new bumper sticker:

Talent Happens.

Only problem is you never know when and where next.

At swim in an ocean of cultural mediocrity, where landfall if it comes comes only on tiny islands of irony which are soon flooded by the ever-rising tide of trendy stuff with the shortest of shelf lives, we become jaded and forgetful. We lament too long and too cleverly the lost paths to past glories ("Where did we go astray?") and we forget, over and over, that those paths were—and are—always cut simply by talent. (In such a confused age we also are subject to the plague of mixed metaphors, but that’s a topic for a different essay.)

Case in point: Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys, now pigeon-holed (albeit with praise) as "that Irish gay novel."

Well. Hamlet is also that Danish revenge drama.

Most people who shouldn’t read At Swim won’t, either because it’s Irish (which it gloriously is) or, more likely, because it’s gay (which it also gloriously is).

Those who should read it will, some because it’s Irish, some because it’s gay, and some few—these being the ones who really need to read it—because it is (watch out: here come 21st-century taboo adjectives) beautiful, inspiring, and very very dangerous.

Starting even before you get to page 1, O’Neill throws down the writerly gauntlet, honoring and challenging Irish (and world-writerly) ghosts past and present with the title, a play off Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Clever (some reviewers thought too clever by half), but also deadly accurate, this title that encapsulates and celebrates the central actors and actions in the wee bit of Ireland ca. 1915 to which the author is about to transport us.

"Transport." Ah, another of those tricky forbidden words.

Jaded, we forget the transportative, transformative power of great art: art as time machine, as psychic enema, as political purgative, as esthetic emetic, etc., etc.

The wizard behind the curtain puts us in Dublin and environs for the year leading up to the abortive Easter Uprising of 1916, at first on the distant fringe of discontent, but slowly and masterfully moving us closer and closer to the seductive danger of the political, religious, and sexual center of Irish culture, which in a highly unlikely bravura move O'Neill somehow makes stand in for all cultures.

No serious writer in Ireland (or anywhere else) can undertake long fiction now without constant awareness of Joyce’s shade, quietly, dominantly present. Perhaps it is the shade that throws down the gauntlet, which many—most?—serious writers of late have chosen—so great is the challenge—to ignore, skipping over Joyce as if he’d never happened and pulling off the easier trick of modernizing (or lately, post-modernizing) Dickens, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Woolf, or--Heaven help us--even Hemingway. On page 1 O’Neill picks up the gauntlet and runs with it (sorry, there go those out-of-control metaphors again). The challenge for O’Neill is the greater: Joyce was writing out of his own days and times, whose details heaped themselves daily at his step; O’Neill, set on an archeology of the heart, seeks and sees a hundred years in the past.

We find ourselves in the head of Mr. Andrew Mack, at stroll in a Dublin suburb on a fine day. Indeed, we are mercilessly in his head (pace, Joyce) as O’Neill regales us with the sights, sounds, and people Mr. Mack encounters and reacts to in a resonant vocabulary that astounds, baffles, delights, and seduces.

There it begins: one faintly comic Irishman, at stroll. An unlikely Virgil to take us into this gray, green, and blue patch of heaven and hell as richly detailed—and distant—as a Breughel canvas of peasants at, well, play.

Joyce (and countless epigones who don’t warrant naming) for all his swash forget finally story (Scheherezade fatally manqué). Following the quick tour of the Dublin burb where everything is going to happen (at least till Easter 1916), O’Neill peoples this difficult place with difficult people: Mr. Mack, plus older son Gordie (who’s off at war), younger son James (a scholar-in-waiting), daft Aunt Sawny, Madame MacMurrough (doyenne, matriarch, and hell-bent keeper of the Irish dream of independence), her nephew Anthony (banished to her keeping by her English brother following his discovery in the embrace of a chauffeur-mechanic and resultant two-year prison sentence), and Doyler Doyle (son of a neer-do-well former army mate of Mr. Mack’s, workers’ friend, and rebel in the making).

With place in place and people in place, let the revels begin.

Reading At Swim, Two Boys is like listening to the first three Beethoven symphonies in succession, without pause. Attention must be paid to what has come before (especially just before) so in the first symphony Beethoven out-Mozarts Mozart—as O’Neill, trusting the reader to trust him, at the outset out-Joyces Joyce.

As Beethoven moves away from, beyond the necessaary obeisance to his grandly mannered predecessor and gets on with the revelatory business of becoming Beethoven before our very eyes, O’Neill in style, structure, and content invites us along on his own path-finding where, as in all the best art, the necessary becomes obvious and the obvious becomes necessary.

Slow going, these pages are, packed with resurrected slang, patois, and the names of the objects and actions of daily Irish life a hundred years ago. Words parade past that look like English, in sentences that parse like English, but many you will find neither in the distant corners of your mind nor in your better dictionaries. One Irish archeologist at work and, as with what we revere in museums, we readily, willingly take on faith that yes, this is how they looked, spoke, thought, and acted.

A slow, slow, rich read-of-a-book.

You can stand in front of the Bayeux Tapestry and take it in at a glance. Or can look at it and quickly lose yourself, for hours, for days, in its near-infinite detail.

Your choice, dear quick-fix/instant-gratification/sound-bite/quick-cut denizen of the Third Millennium.

A dangerous book on more levels than one is these days unaccustomed to thinking about what's really important life-wise:

1. Novels can matter, still. All that’s been missing these long lean years ("as slow as a wet week") is talent.

2. At the end one wants only to start again from the beginning. Imagine the frustration of the open-eared listener that night in Vienna the first time the Fifth Symphony was played, who, disbelieving, heard anew but had to then go home and only try to remember what had just happened. For us luckier readers, here’s the book, ready, waiting.

3. After swimming with O’Neill one suddenly (well, actually, slowly as one reads) becomes impatient with very good—but now lesser—writers who fill pages and shelves and prize lists. Why bother?

4. A gloried, stained world this, one, as painted here, filled with half-questions and half-answers, some subtle (what, then, of this love?) and some directly in your face (these male anatomies mix and mingle forthrightly, and which of society’s unthinking judgments do you find yourself applying?).

5. Only connect? Were it so simple.

6. Unorthodox, subversive hints of things to come in the tortured, serpentine history of consciousness. The interior "monologues" that Joyce unleashed too often for comfort shatter here into dialogues and even trialogues, casting the vaunted, over-used simplicity of Joyce’s breakthrough "stream of consciousness" in a chiaroscuro that reveals previously unquestioned shallowness. The stream of consciousness according to O'Neill has several, simultaneously flowing tributaries.

7. We American innocents know nothing, nothing of what it’s like, say, on a lovely Easter morning, to face the anger and violent power of an unfettered empire. For those who can look, what happens in O’Neill’s St. Stephen’s Square as the bullets finally fly is, ought to be, reminder enough. The naked young lie dead while the armored many take aim, take aim, and take aim till all movement has stopped. For a while. "Comeuppance is mine," saith the Lord, but who with safely armored ears hears?

La condition humaine: "I give without loss as I buy without gain." Thus spake Anthony MacMurrough in this recreated beginning of the Great Capitalist Century. This idling man who, conjuring sin, might think to masturbate in church while eating chocolate, smoking dope, fantasizing a three-way with Mary and Jesus, and tearing pages from the holy book to wipe up his seed, but for all that, innocent beyond his knowing because the century’s horrors lie before, rather than behind, him. Soon enough, enough of the green tragedy of Ireland—of the Earth—will come his way to sate him with knowledge.

Alas, poor Mann, we knew him well, quivering in the shadows of San Marco, trembling at the least glimpse of the impossible, unreachable Tadzio.

After Death in Venice, what?

At swim, two boys, that's all.

Instead of Huck and Jim floating platonically down the Mississippi, or drunken Rupert and Gerald wrestling manlily by the fireplace, or Maurice and Alec muddling through, we have Jim and Doyler swimming the frigid Irish Sea to a rocky islet where love happens that Twain and Lawrence and Forster and Mann may have dreamed but sadly never wrote.

And how some of the critics did squirm—and scholars will squirm—when after hundreds of pages of verbal magic O’Neill puts the dreaded two-shot before them and then moves in…

Listen! Listen! "I’m most definitely NOT ready for this close-up, Mr. O’Neill!" they squeal.

Many who should will not read At Swim, Two Boys because it’s only "that gay Irish novel." Many who should will read it, because or in spite of that, and will get far more than they bargained for. It is to the 21st century novel what Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations was to the 20th-century piano.