Oh, Play That Thing

From Publishers Weekly Doyle stumbles somewhat in this sequel to his excellent 1999 bestseller, A Star Called Henry. Beginning with Irish revolutionary Henry Smart's arrival in New York City in 1924, the story follows Henry's subsequent adventures in advertising, bootlegging, pornography, unlicensed dentistry and keeping ahead of the former associates who'd like to see him eat a lead sandwich. After encroaching too much on a mobster's turf--and getting lucky with another powerful fellow's kept lady--Henry hightails it to Chicago, where he becomes the unofficial manager of a young Louis Armstrong. Though serendipitously reunited with his beloved wife and the daughter he's never met while trying to rob her employer's house, Henry soon heads back to New York to help Louis make it big. While just as brash and lively as Doyle's earlier novels, this one isn't nearly as focused; the dialogue-heavy narrative is interspersed with shifts in setting, time and plot, and characters appear and disappear with little consequence, their spoken parts hasty, repetitive and often perplexing. Worse, Doyle takes Henry Smart's charm for granted; readers unfamiliar with his previous adventures may roll their eyes at his arrogance and incessant sexual encounters. There's just too much material; any of the novel's numerous strands could have been fleshed out into its own book. That said, the novel is still a lot of improbable fun. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com How could the author of so spirited a novel as A Star Called Henry write a sequel as lame as Oh, Play That Thing?

All I can figure is that it's one of those cases where a writer's imagination deserts him when he lights out for new territory. The earlier novel was set during the Irish Rebellion, and its headlong, rushing narrative seemed to just pour from Doyle with poetic urgency. In the Jazz-age America of this follow-up, he thrashes around without purpose, inspiration or -- despite a profusion of dumb jokes and set-ups -- wit. He's out of his element, and it shows.

In A Star Called Henry -- a most auspicious start to this projected trilogy -- Doyle crafted a marvelously mythic figure in Henry Smart: a child of the Dublin slums who shoots, steals and fornicates his way across early 20th-century Ireland, soaking up all the wild, restless energy of a country undergoing a violent rebirth.

The son of a listless mom and a dad who made a name for himself as the violent one-legged bouncer at a local brothel, Henry takes to the streets early. Armed only with the survival instincts he inherited from his father and the wooden leg he used to crack heads, Henry grows up to become a good-looking Lothario and a remorseless killer for the Irish Republican Army.

Along with his eventual wife and co-conspirator -- a former schoolteacher he knows only as Miss O'Shea, aka "Our Lady of the Machine Gun" -- Henry travels the countryside by bicycle, picking off "peelers" (cops) and suspected spies, a wily tough who thinks he's the master of his own fate. Actually, he's just a pawn in a larger game, and he becomes a marked man when a power struggle breaks out within the IRA ranks. Henry escapes to America, leaving behind Miss O'Shea and their infant daughter, Saoirse, trusting fate to one day reunite his family.

Fate kicks in all right in the new book: Lucky for him, Henry arrives in a country where not only can anything happen, but moronic plot turns grow on trees.

Arriving on Ellis Island in 1924, Henry finds work as a sandwich-board walker and bootleg-whiskey runner. With the missis stuck in Ireland, Henry's latest chippie is Fast Olaf's half-sister, who, besides being the near sibling of a low-level mobster, is something of a philosophical hedonist. After Henry runs afoul of the mob and Fast Olaf's half-sister saves his neck, the two run off to upstate New York, where they try to scam the locals by passing her off as a palm-reader and him as a dentist. When Henry finds out that one