One daughter also rebels a bit as she gets older she resents her father discouraging her from taking a scholarship to go to university. But unlike the oldest son, he makes up with his father and frequently returns home. The boy stops attending school and flees to London with help from his sister and brother living there. When he is only fifteen, he takes up with an experienced 22-year old girl visiting back home for the summer from New York. The youngest boy, spoiled by his three older sisters and the second wife, rebels in a big way. The two younger girls get civil service jobs in Dublin and they come home every weekend until they both marry. The oldest daughter is a nurse in London she visits home two or three times a year. The prodigal son owns a business renovating houses in London. All his children will eventually leave home to get work. The girls and his wives accept his dominance the boys rebel. He sees his father once at one of his sister’s weddings and they speak politely for a minute. The son keeps in contact with his brother and sister but never comes back home. His blackest moods come about most often when he thinks of his prodigal son, the oldest boy who ran off to London and never came back.
He leads the family in Catholic prayer every evening – a full rosary on their knees. The father says grace before and after meals.
His wife feels “inordinately grateful when he behaves normally” and “inordinately grateful for the slightest goodwill.” Yet his girls and youngest boy love him especially in those rare moments when he might dance around the room. If a dish is dropped in the kitchen everyone freezes and looks to him for his reaction. He is stern and has ‘black moods ’ “…silence and deadness would fall on them” when he walks into a room. He is served food first at a separate table and the rest of the family eats together afterwards. His wife and three daughters wait on him. We learn quickly that he is the master of his roost. He spends his days in backbreaking work dawn to dusk on his family farm, bringing in hay, tending the animals, mostly cattle. He has small pension from having been in the Irish Army, but money is tight. As the story went along I thought more of Stoner even though no one would call Stoner a curmudgeon, but, I thought: this is his life, this is the way he is this is the way things are it is what it is he’s not going to change what do you expect? But Ove was not a father and he softened up over time. While reading it, at first I thought of A Man Called Ove, another curmudgeon. This tale of a curmudgeonly Irish father and his effect on his five children was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1990.
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