The Edge of Sadness is a 1962 novel by Edwin O'Connor.
The book is narrated by Father Hugh Kennedy, a Catholic priest in an unnamed city that has a lot of Irish Catholics. As the story begins, Father Hugh has just gotten back to his hometown after some time away. A long flashback reveals that Hugh is an alcoholic, who left town because he was sent away four years ago to a rehab clinic for Catholic priests after his drinking got out of control.
In the present day, the story follows Hugh's interactions with the Carmody family, beginning with patriarch Charlie Carmody's 81st birthday party. Charlie Carmody is one of the richest men in town and also an irredeemable jerkass, a skinflint, a slumlord, and an all-around unpleasant person who enjoys insulting and browbeating people, all the while presenting a false front of good humor. Charlie's son John and daughter Helen were Hugh's childhood friends; John also became a priest. Oldest daughter Mary is more or less her father's live-in servant and caretaker. Youngest son Dan is like his father in that he's a money-grubbing capitalist but unlike his father in that he's a failure at it.
Father Hugh wonders why old Charlie invited him to the birthday party. As weeks roll by and Charlie continues to dream up excuses to hang out with Hugh, Hugh continues to puzzle at why the old man seeks out his acquaintance. Meanwhile, characters confront their past and acknowledge buried feelings.
Tropes:
- The Alcoholic: Hugh. He recounts how he first started drinking as a way of drowning his sorrows after his father died of cancer, and how he started drinking more, and more, and more, until he was passing out in church and stumbling through the streets while intoxicated. Eventually his bishop relieved him of priestly duties and sent him to a retreat where Catholic priests go to dry out. In the present setting, Hugh is acutely aware of how people steal sideways glances at him when alcohol is served at Charlie's party.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Patriarch Charlie Carmody is a mean, abrasive jerkass. His wife has been dead for 20 years, but back in the day, she was so beaten down that she eventually stopped talking to him completely. Eldest daughter Mary is a Broken Bird and an Old Maid who was browbeaten into being her father's caretaker. Son John can't stand his father; daughter Helen married as soon as she could to get out of the house and avoid becoming Mary. Youngest son Dan is a loser who flits from scheme to scheme, at one point pathetically trying to rope Hugh into some dodgy investment.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: Both a Discussed Trope and also averted. The first sentence of the novel is Hugh saying "This story at no point becomes my own," and he goes on to say "the story belongs, all of it, to the Carmodys, and my own part...was never really of any great significance at all." Yet despite this disclaimer Hugh is clearly the protagonist. Besides the long flashback section where he recounts his descent into alcoholism and how he hit bottom and was sent to a clinic to dry out, Hugh spends much of the novel wrestling with his insecurities and what it means to be a good priest.
- Foreshadowing: John offhandedly mentions how he's getting a checkup for "a little stomach trouble." Later, when Hugh drops by to see John near the end, he observes how his friend looks drawn and tired. That same night, John dies of an intestinal ulcer that ruptures and causes a fatal hemorrhage.
- Hates Everyone Equally: John, and it's a real problem for him, because he's a Catholic priest and it's a priest's job to like people and help them. But John confesses to Hugh that he doesn't like anybody, that he pretty much can't stand the world except for Hugh and Helen, and in particular he loathes his parishioners and cringes whenever one approaches him with a problem.
- Ignored Epiphany: As Charlie recounts when he thinks he is dying, at some point in his life he realized that he's an abrasive jerkass and that nobody likes him, including his children. He briefly considers changing his ways, but decides that it's too late and that everybody knows him too well and would just think that he's faking. So he doesn't.
- Intro Dump: Charlie and his children John and Mary are introduced at the beginning, but the rest of the Carmody clan—sister Mary, brother Dan, Helen's husband, Dan's wife, Helen's son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren—are all introduces over two pages when Hugh shows up at Charlie's birthday party.
- Jerkass: Charlie is an unpleasant, mean person, who enjoys insulting people, irritating them, lording his success over them. Early in the novel, he tells Hugh that he likes to watch the birds in his garden, then reveals what he really likes is to throw rocks at them.
- Old Retainer: Charlie's maid Agnes and cook Gertrude, both of whom are elderly (Gertrude is actually called an "old retainer") and both of whom are devoted to Charlie even while they don't seem to like anyone else.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: John is upbraiding himself for hating his own parishioners and avoiding contact with them, when out of nowhere he flips it around and starts attacking Hugh. He goes on at length about how Hugh is no better than he is, because while at least John admits he doesn't like people, Hugh pretends to be the generous and kindly priest, while also avoiding his parishioners. He says that Hugh refuses to engage with his parishioners because they're ethnically different than him, they're Polish and Mexican and such rather than the Irish Catholics that Hugh belongs to. Hugh is offended but soon realizes that John is right, and begins to actually engaged with the people in his parish.
- The Reveal: A prosaic one. Throughout the novel Father Hugh puzzles about why on Earth Charlie Carmody, who barely knew him, keeps paying visits to the church and inviting Father Hugh over. The answer comes when Charlie appears to be dying of a heart attack. Charlie confesses that he knows no one likes him, but back in the day he knew Hugh's late father, and he is intensely curious to know if Dan Kennedy liked him, if Dan might have been the one person who didn't avoid Charlie's company. The answer is that Hugh's father loathed Charlie just like everybody else, but Hugh lies through his teeth to comfort a sick old man.
- The Scrooge: Charlie Carmody is a penny-pinching miser who hounded the poor people who live in his tenements. Even Father Danowski, a genial and good-natured person, describes Charlie as "the celebrated miser."
- Self-Made Man: Charlie Carmody rose from dire poverty to become a rich landowner and businessman. When Charlie is making his last confession and admitting to his Jerkass ways, he wonders if the hardness that allowed him to become a success is also what made him mean.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Father Danowski, who is young and earnest and enthusiastic, and generous and friendly, but who seems convinced that priests have to be extremely serious people. This manifests in Father Danowski speaking in very stilted and formal language. Here's how he describes being bullied by the other students at seminary:"Also I would be sent upon artificial errands. For implements which did not exist. And then many times in the gymnasium after taking my shower I would go to put on my clothing again only to discover that someone had exchanged my trousers with the trousers of another person. A person who was invariably much smaller than myself."
- Slice of Life: A portrait of a Catholic priest and recovering alcoholic and his relations with a Big, Screwed-Up Family. Nothing really happens and there is no great plot arc; instead the book is a character study.
- Third-Person Person: Roy, the janitor at Hugh's church, and a comic relief character. Roy is a transparent liar and a shiftless layabout who makes transparently phony excuses in order to get out of work.Roy: He knows the ropes and he knows his rights. Roy don't need no mouthpiece, Father. Not Roy. Not when the right is on his side.
- Title Drop: Toward the end John describes his sister's unhappy marriage, saying of Helen that "The edge of sadness was visible." (He blames their father, for being so unpleasant that Helen married the first man who showed interest just to get out of the house.). Then at the end of the book Hugh goes back to his dilapidated, half-empty church, where he's decided to stay rather than take a promotion. He says he first "felt a touch of regret, an edge of sadness," before he instead begins to feel joy at the challenge of rebuilding the place.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The city where the events take place is unnamed, but it's got a lot of Irish Catholics, and it's big enough to have a bishop but not big enough to have an archbishop. This would fit O'Connor's hometown of Providence, RI.
- The X of Y: The Edge of Sadness
