In addition he has a remarkable gift for extravagant comic simile ("trying not to offend him was like crossing a minefield on crutches"). Perhaps the most obvious and pleasing lies in the elaborate texture of his formal prose, which slides incongruously into the colorful "begobs" and "bollixes" of working-class Dublin slang. His social comedy arises from a number of dissociations. Some of Leonard's passages make one laugh aloud. Much of the memoir recalls the Joycean archetype - the young artist struggling to escape family, religion, and social mores - to escape Ireland itself in order to survive. He guides us through his childhood in Dalkey, a village just south of Dublin, during the economically depressed 1930s, through maturity in the war years, to his decision to leave Ireland in the late 1950s after 14 years in the civil service. Not only do we find Leonard's wry and silly Da here, but also his grandmother, mother, neighbors, friends, and employers. "Home Before Night" ventures into the territory of author/playwright Hugh Leonard's recent Broadway success "Da," giving us a wider view of his Irish homeland and compatriots than did the play.
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