Hard-Boiled But Semi-Tough

By R.Z. Sheppard

HARP by John Gregory Dunne; Simon & Schuster; 235 pages; $18.95

Confession is a religious ritual and a literary device, a point that John Gregory Dunne has illustrated a number of times during his career as a U.S. journalist and novelist. For example, Vegas (1974) was an unflattering, candid account of a bad time in the author's life, an on-the-road book that played personal problems against the city that passes for Sodom, U.S.A.

In a field that includes his wife Joan Didion, Dunne has held his own as an observer of public and private wastelands. But he has found a more authentic voice in fiction (True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue). His characters are barbed, cynical and funny. Their attitudes and remarks reveal gifts for malice, resentment and mordant sentimentality, which Dunne associates with his immigrant heritage. As he writes in Harp, a memoir that takes its title from the slang for a son or daughter of the Old Sod, "Nothing lifts the heart of the Irish caroler more than the small vice, the tiny lapse, the exposed vanity, the recherche taste."

Outside the ventriloquism of fiction, Dunne, 57, sounds like a Harp from one of his own novels. Yet he seems to have had some trouble getting comfortable with his natural delivery. The problem lies in the dirty secret of class consciousness. "It took me nearly a quarter of a century to realize that here was the tension that gave me a subject," he notes, after admitting that while growing up Irish Catholic in West Hartford, Conn., he yearned to be an Episcopalian and a member of Wasp society.

It wasn't that Dunne lacked status. His grandfather was a grocer who built himself up to community pillar, and his father was a respected surgeon. Dunne went to Princeton University and perfected talking through his nose, the better to honk down the lower orders. But once a Harp always a Harp, a lesson driven home by another old institution, the U.S. Army. German whores, barracks mates with tattoos, the general cynicism toward military routine, all validated his own outlook. Truth be told -- and Dunne tells it -- he is fascinated by life on the wild side.

Much of the author's experience is the vicarious quest for material and a hard-boiled persona. He becomes knowledgeable about firearms by reading about them; he familiarizes himself with the latest in sex toys by researching them at a Frankfurt porno shop. But his education in cardiology is firsthand. "In the seventh year of the Reagan kakistocracy, the medical dyes shooting through my arterial freeways were forced to make a detour around a major obstruction," he writes with calculated self-mockery.

This brush with mortality in middle age provides Harp with a certain amount of momentum. The deaths of family members lead to a search for his ancestral roots in Ireland and an application for an Irish passport. His motives are mixed: "The fact is I wanted an Irish passport for the simple reason that I was eligible for one. Trying to get one would both add structure to my journey and force me into that examination of my Irish background that I had always so rigorously rejected."

Dunne is not naturally introspective, which may be bad news for the self- help set but is good news for readers who like snappy prose, to say nothing of snappishness. Dunne takes particular pleasure in knocking a great American unknockable from his hometown. Katharine Hepburn, he harps, "has always seemed to me all cheekbones and opinions, and none of the opinions has ever struck me as terribly original or terribly interesting, dependent as they are on a rather parochial Hartford definition of quality, as reinterpreted by five decades' worth of Studio unit publicists." Writing well, or at least trying to, is the best revenge.