The son of Hollywood actors, author Darcy O'Brien knows a thing or two about the life he depicts in his forgotten classic "A Way of Life, Like Any Other." O'Brien's protagonist is himself a child of Hollywood, whose parents' glory days have passed them by, leaving wreckage in the wake for all to bear.

First published in 1977, this hidden gem has been reissued, with an insightful introduction by none other than Seamus Heaney.

The Nobel Prize-winning poet writes, "[O'Brien's] mother, the actress Margueritte Churchill, was a great anglophile and gave him his first name in order to link him to the character in Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice.'

If she was intent on countering the American Irishness of the O'Brien connection, she didn't succeed, since at Berkley [author] Tom Flanagan would reveal the Irish dimension of the Darcy name (wasn't there a Mr. Bartell D'Arcy in The Dead, for a start)."

Heaney goes on: "In doing so the teacher is bound to have brought the student of Joyce to an awareness that the English, Irish, and American traditions constituted a kind of literary trampoline where [O'Brien] could exercise and excel."

Brooding and funny, as well as a fascinating portrait of a changing, mid-century Hollywood, "A Way of Life, Like Any Other" is yet another lost title laudably reclaimed by the New York Review of Books Classics imprint.

(

$12.95 / 155 pages

/ NYRB Classics

)