I consider it a privilege — although it came as a big surprise to me to learn about it — that I have written one of the very few novels that exist about the Irish in San Francisco. It was a surprise because the familial conversations in the book, the Catholicism, the manner of expression, the worrying about The Troubles in Ireland, the humor about the Irish and The Church and The Drink ... all that simply came from my childhood and what I heard at the dinner table.

My Father in the Night was published in hard cover by Mercury House in 1991 and in soft cover by Ballantine Books a year or so later. It tells of eleven-year-old Patrick Pearse, known to everyone simply as Pearse, and his conflicted relationship with two men, his grandfather MJ and his father Michael.

The Troubles in Ireland are at the center of this novel. The differing points of view toward this ages-long conflict on the part of the two older men supply the emotional tension that the boy Pearse (named by his father for one of the leaders of the Dublin Post Office takeover of 1916 that began the Irish civil war against the British) must negotiate.

The center of the novel is a political issue, and a novel should never be a political tract. Those that exist principally for reasons of politics are soon forgotten, because they are so often poorly written and, far worse, irrelevant to the central purpose of the novel, which is to be an exploration of the soul’s progress from ignorance to revelatory knowledge. I hope it’s that kind of novel that I wrote. Novels as political manifestos are meaningless because they are always so short-sighted.

But at least in part, this novel was an exercise for me in determining what I felt about the relationship between the British, the Irish, and the diaspora of Irish to the north American continent. When I wrote it, that entire process was still a major theme in the United States in what was being written about Ireland. It was the very subject itself of at least one hundred and fifty years of Irish-American writing and, for me, essential to my own book.

Now things are changing. If you write a novel about Ireland in 2007, I wager that it will contain little about The Troubles, except as something in the memory. The Celtic Tiger, as Ireland is now sometimes called, is among the fastest growing economies in Europe, if not of the world. Ireland is — imagine this! — an economic power. Had politicians such as the Anglo-Irish Ian Paisley and the I.R.A. man Martin McGuinness appeared together ten years ago in the same place, it would have been to engage in a shoot-out. Now they are working together — albeit testily — to further Northern Ireland’s future, and therefore that of the entire island.