Oh, Play That Thing

Praised as “a masterpiece” by the Washington Post, A Star Called Henry introduced the unforgettable Henry Smart and left Roddy Doyle’s innumerable fans clamoring for more. Now, in his first novel set in America, Doyle delivers. Oh, Play That Thing opens with Henry on the run from his Irish Republican paymasters, arriving in New York City in 1924. But in New York, and later Chicago—where he meets a man playing wild, happy music called Louis Armstrong—Henry finds he cannot escape his past.

A highly entertaining cross-country epic and a magnificent follow-up to A Star Called Henry, this prodigious, energetic, sexy novel is another Roddy Doyle triumph.

Henry Smart is on the run. Fleeing from his Republican paymasters, the men for whom he committed murder and mayhem, he has left behind his wife, Miss O'Shea, in a Dublin jail, and his infant daughter. When he lands in America, it's 1924, and New York is the center of the universe. Henry, ever resourceful, a pearl gray fedora parked on his head, has a sandwich board and a hidden stash of hooch for the speakeasies of the Lower East Side. When he starts hiring kids to carry boards for him, he catches the attention of the mobsters who run the district. It is time to leave, for another, newer America.

In Chicago there is no past waiting to jump on Henry. Music is everywhere, in the streets, in nightclubs, on phonograph records: furious, wild, happy music played by a man with a trumpet and bleeding lips called Louis Armstrong. But Armstrong is a prisoner of his color, and the mob is in Chicago too: they own every stage—and they own the man up on the stage. Armstrong needs a man, a white man, and the man he chooses is Henry Smart.

In Oh, Play That Thing, Roddy Doyle once again gives us a prodigious, energetic, sexy novel, rich with language and music and, as Henry makes his way across America, teeming with surprises. It is both a saga unto itself—full of epic adventures, breathless escapes, and star- crossed love—and a magnificent follow-up to A Star Called Henry. Doyle's writing to a new level. (The New York Times Book Review) Post) intimate authenticity of a poet. (Boston Sunday Globe) don't want to end. (Seattle Times)

Author Biography: Roddy Doyle is the author of six previous novels, including a Booker Prize finalist, The Van, and a Booker Prize-winning international bestseller, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. He has also written several screenplays and books for children.

Philadelphia Weekly

Vibrant, punchy images come in quick succession, evoking city streets teeming with life and possibility like the gritty poetics of John Dos Passos.

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He is the author of 6 acclaimed novels, and Rory and Ita, a memoir of his parents. He won the Booker Prize in 1993 for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.


From the Hardcover edition.