SOURCE: “Kicking the Air,” in New York Review of Books, Vol. 42, No. 10, June 8, 1995, p. 45.

In the following excerpt, Donoghue complains that McCabe does not bring the city of Dublin to life in The Dead School, and that the novel is not as powerful as McCabe's earlier The Butcher Boy.

Patrick McCabe's reputation largely depends upon The Butcher Boy (1992), a gothic tale of small-town Ireland in which a boy, Francie Brady, starts out sounding like Tom Sawyer and ends up murdering a local woman, Mrs. Nugent. Francie's mother is insane and drowns herself; his father is a drunk. Francie gets a job in a pig slaughterhouse. The culture The Butcher Boy intuits—though realism is not the whole story—is a mixture of Catholicism and TV, with the addition, for Francie, of comics and the Beano Annual. Here is a passage from the scene in which Francie kills Mrs...