Cougar News Editor

All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald, the 2008 Book-in-Common
 

I read memoirs, biographies, fiction about death, heartbreak, disaster, despair, poverty and survival and I often think to myself, “What am I supposed to do about this?”

Is it enough to just know about it? Is it enough to know about South Boston in the 1970s, or Oakland, East Dallas, Baltimore, Chicago, Cambodia, Auschwitz, Darfur, Myanmar, Wounded Knee?

What do these places mean? I could read every book, watch every film and listen to every lecturer about all the suffering of the world in all of known history, and I wonder what it means to know something. Ignorance is bliss because you don’t know any better. But we’re told the biggest obstacle to battling AIDS, racism, genocide, et al. is knowledge, understanding and awareness.

OK, I’ve read Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls. I’m aware. I’m knowledgeable. I think I understand. What’s next? Knowing seems so flaccid and meaningless. Then again, knowing doesn’t have some physical manifestation nor is it, necessarily supposed to incite some action. If ending racism meant everyone reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, then let’s get Barnes and Noble to give us a discount and fix it.

However, books like All Souls aren't supposed to get everyone excited and move to Boston to get people off angel dust, like MacDonald’s sister who fell off the roof of a building with narcotics coursing through her veins and ended up with severe brain damage. The ghetto MacDonald and his family lived in during the 1970s is no more. It’s trendy and hip lofts and coffee bars on the seaside.

MacDonald and the characters in his life are like ghosts now despite not all of them are dead. But the fact is many are dead -- many of MacDonald’s own family and friends. He describes a candlelight vigil in which hundreds of “survivors” get on a stage, walk up to a microphone and orate the name of family and friends that were murdered, committed suicide or had their lives suffocated by drugs and alcohol.

In All Souls, MacDonald breathes new life into the names taking the reader back 30-odd years to the South Boston projects. In it, all his siblings are alive, his mother is ever-optimistic and youth feels like forever. He brings them back one more time for us, the reader, to try and imagine what it would be like to live in the ghettos of South Boston and never really know if you’ll be struck by a stray bullet or get news of a friend or family member dying.

Set among the idea of family is that of community, of togetherness. For better or for worse, MacDonald, his family and the community at large were dreadfully loyal to a fault to their own (Caucasian, Irish-American) and to their home. Their apartments may have been infested with grotesquely large cockroaches. But they were their cockroaches. Only they had the right to smash the bugs with the bottom of a shoe. 

With community and identity came racism. Despite the clear issues with drugs, violence and corruption in their own community, the MacDonalds were quick to point out that it was worse in the African American or Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Again, it was their problem, no one else’s.

All of this was set next to the busing riots that took place in South Boston in 1974, in which most of the MacDonald clan had a hand in. All the hate, all the desperation and all of this untethered misguided loyalty exploded. In the aftermath, all that remained was mistrust and pain. Over time, you get he feeling that the loyalty burned away like embers on a fire and eventually extinguished. At that moment, it was OK to cry, it was OK to miss your dead family members. It was OK to realize that what is broken can be fixed.

Just a shame that all those souls had to pass on before it was OK to feel.

Five out of five paws