THE MISREMEMBERED MAN

The first novel by Irish memoirist McKenna (My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress, 2004, etc.) is the story of two 40-ish lonely hearts in County Derry in 1974 who meet through a personals ad.

Jamie McCloone is a lonesome farmer who grew up amid horrific cruelty in one of the notorious Catholic orphanages of mid-century Ireland. Ill-educated, awkward and reticent, he is a sweet, slovenly man of simple tastes whose greatest joy is to play the accordion in a local pub. Lydia Devine, on the other hand, grew up the daughter of a stern, pleasure-shunning preacher and his equally frosty and forbidding wife. After her father dies, this cautious, punctilious schoolteacher, who still lives at home and tends to her aging mother, begins to wonder how she might escape the snares of permanent spinsterhood. When a friend cajoles her into placing an ad in the Mid-Ulster Vindicator, an odd, appealing, oft-interrupted correspondence, not quite friendship and not quite courtship, begins between the two. McKenna alternates light social comedy with chapters depicting the Dickensian horrors of Jamie’s childhood. Her portrait of rural life is amusing and affectionate, wittily and winningly detailed, but Dickens is a dangerous model: For one thing, the third-person omniscient voice that ruled 19th-century fiction can these days seem heavy handed and artificial.

Amiable and competent, but Oliver Twist it is not.