Why did I find this memoir of an Irish boyhood so especially affecting? Replaying Hugh Leonard's "Home Before Night" in my mind, I can think of a dozen things about it that touched me in one way or another. But they seem somehow threadbare in the retelling…. Mr. Leonard has a typically Irish gift for metaphor, as well as the familiar Irish abundance of charming and eccentric relatives….

[Surely] the love between Jack and his ma and da is irresistible—the love that was sometimes "turned upside down" but was love "for all that." Surely the episode in which Jack's da is ordered by the police to drown his son's dog (he fails) is reason enough for admiring "Home Before Night." Yes, it is beautifully written, especially the storm at the incident's climax. But any summary of it is bound to seem sentimental, just as many other incidents seem cute or cloying, and not all that original when viewed in isolation from the whole….

It is true that we have come across almost everything in "Home Before Night" before, in the lives and works of O'Casey, Synge, Joyce and Yeats, among other Irish writers….

But the events of "Home Before Night" encompass a past that any middle-aged reader can remember. The movies that Jack and his cronies moon over are the movies we saw in our own childhoods. The yesterdays they live in are as familiar as our own yesterdays. The tomorrows they dread are today. They really do lack a future, as far as we can tell. So the sense of their being trapped seems more real than that of their predecessors.

Of course, at the end of his book Hugh Leonard does stumble on a future. After 14 years in a civil service job that he abhors, he quits to become a full-time writer and eventually succeeds as a playwright and scriptwriter…. Still, that future somehow doesn't in the least affect the contemporaneity of "Home Before Night." And its powerful sense of the present makes an old Irish story seem wholly original.