Larry Kirwan's Rockin the Bronx charts the last big wave of Irish emigration to America. Part of this migration fetched up in the Bronx's Bainbridge neighborhood in the early 80s. The denizens of Kirwan's novel are undocumented, undereducated, and underemployed. The men take body-breaking construction site jobs while the women nanny for wealthy Manhattanites to the South.
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Kirwan's protagonist, Seán, comes in search of his lost love, Mary, who has disappeared into the maw of the Bronx. Seán's naivety slams into the harsh reality of undocumented life in the early days of Reaganism in New York City's most northerly borough. Drug abuse, rampant criminality, Irish hunger strikes, epic boozing, and the beginnings of the AIDS crisis all suffuse and surround the story with manic intensity.
Crusted in daily concrete dust, Seán flounders obtusely in the quest to restore his relationship with a troubled Mary. He finds meaning beyond the hard labor of summer-scorched building sites when he forms a band with his roommate Danny, whose past is clouded by Northern Ireland's Troubles. Together, they tour the heaving dance halls and bars of the Bronx while coalescing around a new sound that taps into the manic energy of their homesick expat community.
I imagine much of what Kirwan writes, drapes autobiographical detail. Having fronted Black 47, the author was deeply familiar with the scene he writes of in Rockin' the Bronx. The novel masterfully portrays the loneliness, bewilderment, and striving of the last wave of Irish migration, which crashed in economic desperation on America's shores. Many of Bainbridge's pubs are shuttered now, the Irish community of the 80s has moved. Many ultimately achieved legal residency, others returned to the booming Celtic-Tiger Irish economy which exploded in the 90s, some still lurk, undocumented in the shadows of Trump's America.
The book is published by Fordham Press and will be released on March 4th, 2025.
