Eileen Dunbar

“The house stands tall between newer, sturdier homes. . . . It was bigger now, without the stampede of early morning feet bounding down the stairs by twos, pirouetting past the grandfather clock. It was quieter now without the constant smack of the back door heralding someone’s return from the deli, an unannounced visitor seeking a ping-pong game, or someone’s scooting out to warm up a car.” Eileen Dunbar writes these lines near the end of her debut novel, from the perspective of the protagonist, Clare Connelly, now an adult, as she describes the home in which she, her six siblings and her parents lived in the 1960s – 1980s. The house and the family are central to Clare’s story, which begins with the house itself, a large Victorian in suburban Long Island, and the family that occupied it from the 1920s to the mid-1960s before the Connellys moved there when they outgrew their small Cape Cod on the other side of town.

Then we meet Clare in the late 1980s looking back on her life and the lives of her parents: Her mother, a second-generation Irish-American. Her father, who was born in Michigan but returned with his parents and siblings to Belfast, Northern Ireland as a child during the Depression when the automobile plant in which his father worked laid off masses of workers, only to return again after being drafted by the US Army to serve in World War II and then settling in Brooklyn, New York, and working for the Long Island Railroad. Ms. Dunbar tells the story of the bonds among them – between the mother and father, the siblings, the children and their parents – and she leads us deep into the labyrinths of love and laughter and loss. In often lyrical prose, Ms. Dunbar takes us on a journey that highlights the realization of a father’s American Dream, a mother’s overwhelming job in raising seven children on her husband’s working class salary, and children moving through the turbulent history of the times. It is a story told with historical precision, with a real sense of place and time, and above all, a wondrous imagination that manages to capture the complex relationships and lives of its characters.
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