Bullies on the bus, family drama at home

Everyone’s life is potentially a story. Considering this, we should perhaps be less surprised by the sheer number of memoirs being published these days than by the relative paucity of memoirs in ages past. Back then, elements of autobiography found their way into novels. Fiction offered both a veil that protected privacy and an imaginative realm for transforming raw experience into art. Over the last few decades, however, taboos against discussing sex, illness and other “family secrets” have disappeared, and the memoir, correspondingly, has flourished. As with the novel, though perhaps within a narrower compass, the quality of the product varies wildly.

The firstborn child of an Irish immigrant mother and an Irish American father, journalist Dan Barry grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s in Deer Park, Long Island, where he watched TV, played baseball, shot hoops, took the bus to parochial school and got beaten up by the bullies thereon. His parents, like countless other city dwellers, had moved to the suburbs in search of that commonplace yet elusive groundcover known as grass. “Grass meant mine, and mine alone,” he writes in “Pull Me Up.” “From the fence to the curb, mine.... After a long summer’s day, I will sit in the cool of my opened garage and watch the mesmerizing sweeps of my sprinkler, whose water sprays cast rainbows upon my lawn.”

While intellectuals worried about the dangers of the conformity that might result from living in “ticky-tacky houses” with the aforementioned lawn sprinklers, the new suburbanites -- stoical veterans of the Depression, World War II and Korea -- felt they finally had it made. Besides, as Barry notes, beneath the bland semblance of their surfaces, they were in many ways more different from than similar to one another.

The Barrys were a case in point. Noreen, mother of four, a natural storyteller, was an Irish farm girl who had immigrated to America at the tender age of 15. Her husband, Gene, commuted to work as a bond trader in New York but spent much of his spare time keeping track of UFO sightings. While other families were heading for the local drive-in movie, the Barrys might be found somewhere on the Jersey shore looking for flying saucers. Gene Barry was unconventional in other ways as well: He despised football (a “blood sport”), wouldn’t let his sons join the Boy Scouts (“a little army”), hated Nixon, Bob Hope and John Wayne, loved Kennedy, W.C. Fields and the New York Yankees.

He banned the Beatles because he felt they advocated drug use, but, like many of his generation, he came pretty close to being an alcoholic.

The modest harmony of the family’s suburban life was shattered when Gene developed cluster migraine headaches, forcing him to give up his job in the city for less lucrative work on the island. His son recalls “there was no place to get distance from the anguish. The moaning and the banging insinuated themselves into the daily household music, blending with the hum of the bucking washer and the rumbling dryer. We ate dinner to it, watched television to it, did homework to it, all the while struggling to heed our mother’s admonition to ‘keep things light’ .... “

The Barry parents were champion smokers, even by the standards of the day, and even after Noreen Barry developed the lung cancer that would claim her life. Not long after her illness in 1999, Dan Barry (a nonsmoker) experienced his own very frightening bout with cancer.

Reading his poignant description of his mother’s last days (she felt herself sinking away: “Pull me up,” she implored) and his anxiety-riddled account of his own medical ordeal, one gets the feeling that these brushes with mortality were the impetus for this memoir.

From adolescence on, Barry had the desire to be a journalist: His father’s son, he wanted to speak out. But landing a job in his chosen field wasn’t easy, nor was making his way in it.

There’s a connection between Barry the memoirist and Barry the journalist, and it has to do with the urge to capture a moment, to set down some record of that fleeting thing called life.

In the newspaper library, or “morgue,” he reflects: “Reading the old clips, fragile to the touch, you could almost hear the words that had been said.... The contents of these filing cabinets sang of life’s inevitabilities, the distressing and the reassuring. Children will drown in backyard pools and children will be rescued from lakes, again and again.”

Barry’s book exudes a similarly melancholy sense of life’s inevitabilities. But for a memoir, it’s curiously unreflective: not only short on introspection but also lacking the kind of critical perspective that allows a good memoirist to reexamine the past, as Mary McCarthy did in her “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.”

Nor can Barry be accused of subjecting his past to penetrating psychological scrutiny. He contents himself merely with setting down incidents, impressions and memories without providing much sense of their broader social or historical context.

Simply telling the tale, sans analysis, sans perspective, but beautifully, in the manner of a novelist, might have sufficed, but Barry’s style, though certainly emotive, strains for lyricism but doesn’t quite make it: “Then we were there in Ireland, my family, my pens, and I. I reveled in the green of the place, ate the salmon of it, drank the black of it. I recorded it all in ink of blue.” Not likely to find a place among the outstanding specimens of the genre, “Pull Me Up” joins the more modest but hardly discreditable company of memoirs contributing to the still unfinished picture of life in the second half of the 20th century.