Fiction

I've written three novels. Or so. Only one has found print. Some info and some imagery on them below. Still looking for an agent to take me on.

Sligo Crumlin, the American narrator of The Playboy of Hoboken, is in seclusion on the Aran Islands, pursued by an Irish gangster for a mistaken bad debt and stolen drugs. Sligo has come to Ireland for two reasons: to pursue a mysterious Irish girl, Maeve, whom he fell in love with in New York City, and to try to break through his writer’s block and write a play that reflects his own life and adventures. A 1980s misfit, he hates Ronald Reagan and grandiose prosperity, cadging drinks himself any place his friends bar-tend, living on a shoestring, depending on his mother for occasional cash handouts, meals and laundry services. In New York City, Sligo and a group of his college friends have started the Tool and Die Theatre Company and are planning a series of showcase performances to raise money – a “subway series” of scenes from various plays to be performed on-train and in the stations of the #1 train on the West Side. Sligo thrashes about, trying to start to write a play, doing his moribund standup routines at a local comedy club, and then packing it all in to fly to Ireland and pursue Maeve. There he does begin writing his play – an updating of Synge’s famous The Playboy of the Western World about an ordinary young man from the country who invents a heroic life for himself and gets an entire village to fall in love with him – as Sligo pursues Maeve, helps out her ex-fiancé in his chip-van business, and eventually flees from the dangerous Liam Lott. From a folk festival on the grounds of haunted Charleville Castle in Tullamore, to a bloody face-off with Liam Lott among the ancient granite spars of a prehistoric fort on the Aran Island of Inisheer, Sligo perseveres. When he finally returns to New York City, he arrives home on opening night of the theatre company’s triumphant premiere of Sligo’s new play, based on his adventures in Ireland, called The New Playboy of the Western World.

First two chapters: click here.

Goof was an "Editor's Choice" in The Baltimore Sun that summer, where Michael Pakenham wrote: "Digby Shaw's going on 14 when these perhaps only lightly fictionalized 13 little memoirs begin. As they end, he's a few months older, emerging from the eighth grade year that is about over. What happens in between is an enchanting, clean-cut, fresh-served personal panorama of discovery - of a wider world, of doubt about grown-ups' authority, of the tumults and turmoils of oncoming adolescence. But most of all, about growing up - not all at once, but, rather, in an utterly convincing, osmotic manner. Enright grew up a Marylander, and the narrative clearly came from here, but there is a universality about the tales that may capture the hearts of anyone who has brought up an eighth grader or has been one."

Contact Sean Enright to purchase an autographed copy.

The new manuscript, How To Disappear Completely, is quite different, though, as it's set in 1938. Not to descend to pitch-puffery, but some E.L. Doctorow comes to mind, as does Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay- perhaps Doctorow meets Mary Gordon and they decide to drop water balloons on Chabon passing by in an old black Ford?

The backdrop is post-Depression, pre-WWII Catholic Queens, NY - and the novel features silent film star Clara Bow, a deranged WWI veteran named Barker who's obsessed with Bow, a gang of Queens boys who pretend to be cowboy heroes, New Jersey hooverville downcasts,missing television stock certificates, and priests on the make. The plot centers on a 10-year-old boy's efforts to find his father after the father disappears and allegedly drowns, while swimming in the bay off Astoria in plain view of his son and his wife. Poking around in his father's haunts in their neighborhood, the son uncovers mysteries about his father's life and marriage, his struggle with drinking, and mysteries about his mother and aunt's pasts as well. The son's search spreads to lower Manhattan and the hoovervilles of Hoboken and Jersey City. The point of view is mostly the son's, but occasionally switches to the mother's and the aunt's. It culminates in the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadow, a monumental technology showcase when television was first displayed to the mass public, and where surprises and missed chances make the mystery complete.

Download the first three chapters of How To Disappear Completely.