Hopdance

In a great Irish tradition of autobiographical fiction that includes James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Parker’s poignant novel depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg as a nineteen-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present the callow protagonist’s life before, during and after this ordeal. Belfast, drear locus of rain and despond, contributes to the heaviness at the novel’s heart, as its characters strive to rise above the pervasive melancholy of the city and find some human happiness that they can share. Tosh, Parker’s alter-ego, is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin ‘cankers’ of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic relationship with life, which ‘Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones.’ This remarkable, posthumously edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the skills Parker would demonstrate in his plays: plainspoken and stoical in tone, the emotion seeps through a membrane of numb reserve. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a beautiful, sincere, personal testament by a true artist, a wondrous ‘lost treasure’ of literature now presented to its reading public.

[Marilynn Richtarik] has edited this novel/memoir with the utmost care and brought it into being via a terrific Lilliput Press edition., [The novel's] vivid depictions of his alter-ego Tosh’s self-consciousness, shock and physical and emotional suffering may surprise readers who know Parker only from his witty dramatic works. Considering the relationship between this novel and his better-known achievement as a playwright, however, enhances one’s appreciation of both., As the editor of Stewart Parker’s unfinished novel Hopdance, Marilynn Richtarik doesn’t defy any last wishes from the Northern Irish playwright, but she has certainly added to the body of Irish literature from notable 20th-century writers.

Stewart Parker (1941–1988), Belfast dramatist, was the celebrated author of twentieth-century stage classics like Spokesong (1975), Catchpenny Twist (1977), Nightshade (1980), Northern Star (1984) and Pentecost (1987), as well as numerous award-winning plays for television and radio, such as I’m a Dreamer Montreal and The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner.