Be it ever so humbling: In Dermot Healy's The Bend for Home, a memoir about returning to his home town to care for his ailing mother, the acclaimed Irish novelist, poet, and playwright touched upon the ambivalence that can crop up when being among family again. "I'm home, and yet I'm not home. My home is in their minds, among those nuances, memories, chatter, repetitions, but now I'm at one remove. I've lost responsibility for them."

For Ollie Ewing, the troubled main character in Healy's harrowing, edgy, yet often comic novel Sudden Times, change lies not in kin or kind but in degree, with an irresponsibility and "remove" taken to the nth extent. Upon his return to his Irish homeland after "some experiences" as a skilled carpenter in London, a wound-licking sense of estrangement, erratic behavior and paranoia bedevils Ollie, even after he ends a frustrating period of readjustment by finding a job in a supermarket and lodging in a rundown house with a group of art students. Here, home is where you hang your head, and try to head off the onslaught.

"Every sound traveled," Ollie notes, "straight up from the street - drunks, women screaming, church bells, taxis, skinheads. Some frantic demon seemed to grip the folk once darkness fell. At night the whole town bedded down with me." Amid this "ward of the insane" Ollie wrestles with his inner "complaints and sermons, jibes and asides," finding it hard to talk to anyone with these warring impulses and second guesses, the subsequent laments and the overwhelming guilt that come with them.

The past is haunting him too, of course, but the personality-crises perspective dictates that the whole story, despite the sometimes frantic tone, is revealed disjointedly, haphazardly and gradually — but intriguingly — through impressionistic dribs and drabs, initially pointillistic and seemingly pointless. The bigger picture that emerges after a too-cryptic start, however, becomes increasingly focused, expressive, and disconcerting. When a slowly recovering Ollie finally confronts and explicates the events in England and his murky role as both victim and unwitting instigator, the story of an unbalanced young man becomes one of immigrant working life, racketeering in the construction industry, corrupt bosses, the suspicious disappearance and death of Ollie's best friend — which marks the point when Ollie "began losing the thing that tells me who I am" — and, most devastatingly, the murder of his brother.