Glee in the Darkness

Something outrageous is going on here. Perse Joyce, the narrator of Wayne Johnston’s powerful new novel, The Son of a Certain Woman, is literally a marked boy—stained purple by birth, with a swollen lower lip, and outsized hands and feet that not only brand him a freak of the town but also make him vulnerable to the taunts of young bullies and the disdain of their elders. But like other disfigured outsiders of literature, his conspicuous biological condition confers on him insight and perspective. So it is that we see all of the world of 1950s Catholic St. John’s through Perse’s sad brown eyes, heavy as that world is with superstition and a fear both engendered and managed by the long insidious reach of the church.

At first one might think we are in the childhood landscape of an Oskar Matzerath or an Owen Meany, but this is Irish St. John’s, after all, and Johnston has an even...