Except for Benjy (1957) and his first novel, The Oracle (1951), a jejune satire on radio commentators, [Edwin O'Connor] wrote exclusively about Eastern, urban (Boston), Irish-American Catholics, and primarily about the effects of acculturation on their politics, religious beliefs, and family life. He concentrates on a late period of Irish-American history, approximately 1948–1968, with few immigrants or ghettos, when the battles against poverty, discrimination, and the Yankee establishment had already been won, and when, as a result, "nobody felt very Irish any more, or had much reason to." The dominant theme in his novels is the death of Irishness. Many of his characters have made it in America at the cost of their ethnic identity, while others, in apparent defiance of time and the world at large, cling stubbornly to traditional attitudes and customs. The result is a severe conflict between the generations, particularly between fathers and sons, and the widening gap between the values of the old world (Ireland, the ghetto) and those of the new. O'Connor is concerned not simply with the fact of change, however, but with individual responses to it. He is a novelist of manners preoccupied with the interaction between character and history.

Frank Skeffington, the hero of his first major novel, The Last Hurrah (1956), and Charles Kinsella, a central character in his last, All in the Family (1966), represent the extremes of Irish-American political styles and, by extension, of Irish-American thinking about the past.

Skeffington is the old politics incarnate. He has risen from precinct captain to ward boss to mayor to governor. For the past forty years he has ruled the city of his birth like a feudal lord…. In his fief personal relationships are everything. He spends his days dispensing patronage to widows and cronies, planning strategy with the local bosses, all of whom pledge him absolute allegiance, and appearing at wakes and testimonial banquets for disreputable but politically useful party hacks. His interest is politics, not government, specifically the acquisition and consolidation of power and the use of that power for personal, partisan ends. No machine exists apart from Skeffington himself; he has no municipal "program" except the satisfaction of the immediate human needs—food, jobs, housing—of his constituents. Abstract social theories and grand designs are considered profoundly impractical and dangerously Republican.

The Last Hurrah, covering Skeffington's final campaign, is a boisterous, funny, intensely verbal novel that is both the finest account of the Irish political process in American literature and a handbook of Irish-American speech.

For Skeffington, "politics is the greatest spectator sport in the country."… A campaign is not a test of issues, it is a carnival, a popularity contest, and, above all, a public ritual that enables the Irish community to reaffirm its ethnic and cultural identity. The successful Irish politician had to be an entertainer and an orator as well as a skillful anatomizer of ideas; Skeffington is a model of the type. He has a vaudevillian's sense of timing and theatrical effects (vaudeville, a recurrent topic in O'Connor's novels, represents not merely the past but individuality and eccentricity as opposed to colorless conformity—a metaphor for the older Irish character); his complete mastery of the art of Irish political oratory is a unique blend of anecdote, hyperbole, erudition, and invective that can be as subtle as a sonnet or as blunt as a hammer blow. The Last Hurrah is built around Skeffington's conversations with his relatives and cronies and his lively public jousts with his opponents…. [He] thoroughly enjoys the excitement of a campaign and the intricacies of the various factional power struggles. He has no Yankee sense of civic duty…. Politics appeals first to his emotions or, more accurately, his passions…. Even in defeat he talks about the "good times" he has had.

Charles Kinsella, on the other hand, is young, educated, polished, in short, the epitome of the acculturation process. He regards politics, at least in the beginning, as part avocation, part obligation, and part moral crusade…. Compared to Skeffington, he is an extremely aloof candidate. He works through an army of bright young aides, depends heavily on television and slick advertising, and avoids personal appearances whenever possible. He is very conscious of his image, which has been created by a group of New York public relations experts. More importantly, he is able to flout the conventional Irish taboos against social ostentation and elitism and get away with it. Glamour, urbanity, and conspicuous wealth are the ingredients of his style…. The Last Hurrah describes the end of tribal, paternalistic Irish politics; All in the Family presents the sophisticated, patrician politics that has replaced it. (pp. 108-10)

Whereas political discussions in The Last Hurrah are personal, anecdotal, and fiercely pragmatic, in All in the Family they are often theoretical and moralistic—that is, distinctly un-Irish. For Skeffington, an election is an occasion to strengthen the status quo and to reinforce the community's ties to its past. For Charles Kinsella, however, it is an opportunity to break with that past and to initiate a new era of reform and rectitude. (p. 111)

O'Connor accepts the passing of bossism as an inevitable and, on the whole, beneficial event. Skeffington is a charmer, but he is also a demagogue whose parochial, partisan ways finally work against the larger interests of his constituents. He dwells too much on memories of ancient injustices done to his family and race and seems to take childish pleasure in harassing old enemies…. He knows he is an anachronism and yet he attributes his final defeat to "some incomprehensible conspiracy of freakish circumstances" (defections in the ranks, faulty organization), not to history and its dramatic transformation of the Irish-American character. The Last Hurrah is not, therefore, a sentimental apology for graft, nepotism, and gerrymandering, as some critics have alleged. Skeffington's limitations are visible as well as his gifts, and although O'Connor sincerely admires the latter, he also agrees with Nathaniel Gardiner, the Yankee philanthropist who emerges as the conscience of the novel, that "a bigger man and a better man would have acted differently."… (pp. 111-12)

What O'Connor regrets and what accounts for the wistful tone of much of his writing is the demise of the humor, energy, and passionate sense of purpose that were characteristic of Skeffington's generation. Politics was once the only way up for the Irish, their sole entry into a society that otherwise excluded them. It was a collective cause. Because those who went first became tutors for those who followed, it was also a link between generations…. In O'Connor's novels, politics has become a disruptive force in family life. In fact, we find no stable families, only family conflicts. (p. 112)

[The "new breed"] are members of the establishment that their ancestors feared and hated and have no appreciation of the ancient struggles except as material for anecdotes and Hibernian pageants. They tend to regard the old people as quaint, semimythical creatures and to think of Irish history as a collection of legends without significance for the present. Revisionists without a purpose, they are essentially rootless, traveling everywhere but nowhere at home. They lack their ancestors' secure sense of place. Their only passions seem to be money and success; consequently, they are inclined to support candidates who remind them of their lace-curtain aspirations (McClusky, Charles Kinsella) rather than their shanty origins. They look back only to be sure that the past is not about to embarrass them.

Ironically, for all their noble pretensions, the "new breed" are, as O'Connor dramatizes repeatedly, rarely better than their predecessors and often a lot worse…. Charles Kinsella's committing his brother to a mental institution, with the help of the tractable Judge Kilrane, and his detente with Cogan's corrupt state machine are more cynical, self-serving acts than any in The Last Hurrah, a fact which does not beatify Skeffington but points out that Irish-American politics has changed in style but not in substance. The vices of the old boys have been refined while their virtues have been lost. (pp. 113-14)

Politics is only one aspect of Irish-American life with which O'Connor is concerned. Catholicism is another, particularly the Church's relationship to secular institutions and its declining moral and spiritual influence among the Irish.

In the past the Church exercised the type of control over an Irish-American's spiritual life as the Democratic Party did over his political life. Both were hierarchical, authoritarian organizations that strengthened his commitment to the community and his sense of his own identity, his distinctiveness among other immigrants. In most parishes the pastor functioned as a tribal leader, as another boss-politician. He helped to keep cultural traditions alive and defended them against disruptive innovations. He also found jobs, settled disputes, gave advice on important social and political questions, rewarded friends and punished dissidents. His word was law because he spoke for both God and city hall. In return for his services he customarily received the devotion and unquestioning support of his flock.

O'Connor's novels have no clerical dictators, unless we count the aged Cardinal in The Last Hurrah and Father McGovern in I Was Dancing, but the ideal of the old-time parish and the old-time pastor, synonymous with traditional Irish Catholicism, is a powerful influence for good and bad on many of his characters. The Edge of Sadness … dramatizes two different reactions to this ideal, one dangerously nostalgic but ultimately constructive, and the other cynical and self-destructive. Both amplify the theme of the death of Irishness in America.

Hugh Kennedy, the reformed alcoholic who is the narrator, is pastor of Old Saint Paul's, a derelict slum parish…. The Irish have long since moved up to more fashionable, middle-class neighborhoods. (pp. 114-15)

For Hugh, being a "real priest" still means having a special rapport with the people. It means speaking their language, having one's advice solicited and followed, touching souls in intimate and decisive ways…. Earlier, he went through an emotional and spiritual crisis because he had given everything to his parishioners and kept nothing for himself. Now the situation is reversed: he does everything for himself and virtually nothing for his parishioners. His Irishness has become his spiritual albatross.

Charlie Carmody's eighty-first birthday party is a critical event in his rebirth. Once again he meets the gregarious, sharp-tongued old men who were such an integral part of his father's world and his own youth. He listens to their hilarious and interminable conversations about funerals, hospitals, and the sorry state of public transit, and in the process rediscovers his roots…. [He discovers a] basic truth about his vocation: a priest's marriage is to God, not to a particular ethnic group. His choice is either to become a model and teacher for his curate and a true shepherd to his alien congregation, or else to fail a second time as both priest and man…. At the end of the novel he refuses the pastorate of Saint Raymond's, the Gaelic jewel of the diocese, thereby expressing both his acceptance of his priestly responsibilities and his choice of the living present over the dying past. (pp. 115-16)

Unlike Hugh, [John Carmody] despises the Irish, finding them crude, sentimental, and provincial. His great ambition is to escape to some remote monastery where he will never have to listen to another brogue or another melancholy tale about a drunkard husband or a wayward son. He has lived a type of solitary, rigorously intellectual life that is generally disapproved by the Irish-American clergy. (p. 116)

If O'Connor's young people are ungrateful heirs of their cultural traditions, his patriarchs have been poor custodians of them. Charlie Carmody, Jimmy Kinsella, and Waltzing Dan Considine (I Was Dancing) are not charming Pickwickian rogues but belligerent, despotic, self-serving parents for whom "Honor Thy Father" is the first and only commandment. They are intolerant of other ethnic groups and blacks, blindly anticlerical, and hostile to any form of social change that is outside their limited experience. Charlie and Jimmy (also known as "The Irish Baruch") live by an Irish version of the Puritan ethic which says that wealth is merely just compensation for the past sufferings of the race. Charity and magnanimity are the enemies of business (both men are as ruthless as the Yankee financiers of the Irish horror stories) and should be shown to one's family only on special occasions, such as Christmas and birthdays. Moreover, their actions are often a travesty of genuine Irishness. (p. 117)

The "Cardinal" fragment suggests that O'Connor planned to expand a study of the contemporary Church to include the turmoil that followed Vatican II. The Cardinal is another aging patriarch who is caught between the fact of change and his own conservative training and sympathies. His disposition and attitude remind one of Skeffington, and throughout we find the outlines of the familiar O'Connor themes: conflict between generations, the revolt against tradition and authority…. Among contemporary authors, only J. F. Powers has written as knowledgeably and sensitively about the priesthood.

In focusing on priests and politicians O'Connor is not, of course, dealing with the total Irish-American experience, only with its most representative elements. Changes in these roles, which continue to be among the most appealing to Irish-Americans, inevitably reflect other cultural and psychological changes. O'Connor also captures the humor of his characters as rarely captured before. As he explained in an interview, "A great deal of Irish-American fiction has been written. I read it, and began to say to myself, 'Where the hell is the humor?' It was sullen stuff, depressed. Now the Irish writers—O'Casey, Joyce—they have humor, but the Irish-Americans never seemed to capture it. Irish-Americans can be very funny people, but no one seemed to set it down. I thought I'd try." His work lacks the bleakness and harshness of Farrell's or the cynicism of O'Hara's. The brutalities of the ghetto life are left behind along with the sentimental cliches. He is neither a satirist nor an apologist but a compassionate observer of a process. His legacy is a small but remarkably coherent body of work to which anyone interested in Irish-American life in the mid-twentieth century must turn. (pp. 119-20)