Michael Curtin, who died this month aged 72, wrote about men struggling to make sense of the cards that fate had dealt them. His darkly comic take on his home city of Limerick takes in a wider swathe of society than the work of near contemporary Frank McCourt, whose 1996 memoir Angela's Ashes gained more attention.
Curtin's first novel, the partly autobiographical The Self-Made Men, was published in 1980 and describes the Irish emigrant experience in London with unflinching honesty and what one critic called "humorous indecency".
Having attended Sexton Street Christian Brothers school, where he was taught to value good English by teacher Stan Downing, he worked in a cement plant. After five years he wanted to write and thought he could do better in London.
An emigrant in the 1960s, he wrote a play which the Abbey Theatre rejected. Returning to Limerick, he gave up writing for a time until another writer – and Sexton Street old boy – David Hanly persuaded him to try again. This time David Marcus published Curtin's short stories in the New Irish Writing slot in the Irish Press, and success in a Listowel Writers' Week competition followed in 1972. Emboldened by this, Curtin began the long slog of trying to get a novel accepted which culminated in the 1980 publication of The Self-Made Men by leading London publisher André Deutsch.
The slog did not end there. Curtin's papers in the University of Limerick's Glucksman library include 11 rejection letters for The Plastic Tomato Cutter, published in 1991. This, Curtin's fourth novel, and according to some critics his best, considers inter alia the male in pursuit of money, sex, status and church bell-ringing honours.
Critical acclaim
A ne’er-do-well character is named Butsey, a nickname by which Curtin was once known because of the way he smoked a cigarette. In all, six Curtin novels were published to critical acclaim.
Unlike McCourt, Curtin made his home in the city, running a jobbing printing house in O'Connell Street by day and writing by night. Words were his world. He liked crossword setting, but he enjoyed storytelling more, and Somerset Maugham was a major influence, he told the Limerick People on October 5th, 1980.
Curtin's fiction was published in translation in Germany, while at home he inspired a younger generation. Novelist Kevin Barry (City of Bohane) said: "Michael Curtin was a key presence [in Limerick] for a younger generation of writers and artists. He was working at a very high level, on an international basis, and he was a very important example."
Donal Ryan (The Spinning Heart) called him "a writer of effortless wit and a beautiful, humane sensibility. He taught us about the dramas and the joys and the thrilling, hilarious voices to be witnessed and felt and heard all around us, if we only opened our ears and our minds."
Prof Eoin Devereux of the University of Limerick believes Curtin was a comic genius whose six novels “captured Limerick in all its glory. Michael once told me that like Joyce, he would like Limerick to be recreated from them in the event of a nuclear bomb. He had a great eye and ear for the surreal.”
Michael Curtin is survived by his wife Anne (née Hobbins), his children Jason, Michael, Sarah and Andrew, and his brother Tony.