My guess is that the phrase “the luck of the Irish” is of American origin. When one contemplates the lives that some of the best Irish writers have led in and out of the pubs of Dublin during the past half-century or so, “curse” comes to mind as a better word than “luck.” Hence the sobering title of Anthony Cronin’s superb biography, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien, published in London almost a decade ago and recently released here.

O’Brien, a novelist and satirist, was actually three in one—an entity the novelist Dermot Bolger has called “that wondrous multi-layered mind which singularly comprised the Unholy Trinity of Flann O’Brien, Brian O’Nolan and Myles na Gopaleen.” Can any other writer—or any other person—have gone by so many different names over the course of a lifetime? Myles (one instinctively wants to call him by the first name of the nom de plume he adopted for the long-running column he wrote for The Irish Timesstarting in 1940) was born into the riverrun of modern Ireland in 1911. Cronin’s “life and times” approach is fitting, because a writer of O’Brien’s cut is imaginable only in a country that could never quite make up its mind exactly what it was. Those were days when Joyce, and then Beckett, exercised a colossal absence from their self-imposed exile in Paris, when Brendan Behan was playing the stage Irishman in New York and Dublin, when Myles and the poet Patrick