Coming to America Roddy Doyle’s Henry plays that thing BY CLEA SIMON
	Oh, Play That Thing By Roddy Doyle. Viking, 384 pages, $24.95.

Henry Smart’s first adventure was a rush. Born with the 20th century, the "Glowing Baby" of A Star Called Henry tumbled madly through his youth, propelled by hunger, anger, and the Irish war for independence. The Henry Smart we meet up with in Oh, Play That Thing has had some of this velocity worn off him. Landing in New York at the age of 20, he’s already killed too many people and seen too many loved ones die. He’s here to start fresh, having left behind in Ireland a wife in jail and a daughter he’s seen just once, but a bit of the glow and much of the fight is gone.

The instinct for survival remains, and in Oh, Play That Thing, that means becoming American. Working his way from the docks, hauling sandwich-board signs, coffins, and bootleg whiskey, the handsome Henry turns entrepreneur. In Roddy Doyle’s characteristic style, we hear that transformation in Henry’s own words. Translating his Irish poetry into a sales patter fit for the bustling city, he seduces with language, building a new personality as he hones his skills. "I’d just sold a repackaged cake of soap to a hophead with no money," he congratulates himself at one point. "I’d passed my own test."

But New York is too small for Henry. Still on the run from the Irish Republican Army comrades he escaped at the end of A Star Called Henry, he sees too many suspicious faces in the city’s immigrant communities. And so he ends up in Chicago, where assimilation and the art of reinvention have progressed. "There was room for America here," he says, and in Chicago, he discovers jazz. After meeting Louis Armstrong backstage at a club, Henry impresses the rising young trumpeter with his attitude and his gift of the gab, "giving it the old Henry." Armstrong takes to the "ofay that can carry a coloured suit," and the two pair up, Armstrong’s talent paying the bills while Henry serves as the African-American musician’s safeguard in the white man’s world.

For a while, Henry is content. In Armstrong, he’s found something of a soul mate. Only months apart in age, the two share the longings of lost childhood and abandonment, a "What about meee!" cry that manifests itself as music in Armstrong’s hands and seduction in Henry’s. But soon enough a stray comment (" — You, she said. — Are dressed like an African. Why?") awakens Henry to the truth. He’s just "Louis Armstrong’s white man," he realizes. "But maybe I wanted my own trumpet." On the road again, he hooks up with a woman from his past, and soon other, darker shadows are on his trail as well. He’s forced to flee, and as drought turns his new country’s bread basket into a Dust Bowl, he’s joined on the rails by growing numbers of displaced farmers. "This was history," he realizes, "and I knew that I’d missed my American chance."

Don’t you believe it. This volume was conceived as the second in the "Last Roundup" trilogy, and at its end, a battered Henry is once again plucked from the wreckage. At age 57, he doubtless has enough life left for a few more adventures.

The question, really, is: does Doyle? Although Oh, Play That Thing flows along nicely, it lacks the urgency of its predecessor and at times comes close to unraveling. Some of that may be due to its sprawling content: if A Star Called Henry is to some extent a fable about the young Irish republic, then Oh, Play That Thing chronicles the birth of the American century, from the shores of Ellis Island through the Jazz Age and into the Great Depression, and that’s a lot for one character to embody. Doyle’s characters are too lively — too full-blooded and lusty — to be mere ciphers, and the Booker Prize–winning author gets the feel of things — jazz, regret, memory — right. But he’s got so much ground to cover so fast, some things get lost in the wide open spaces.

Description is one casualty. Doyle’s style has become increasingly pared down over the years. Always heavy on the dialogue, set off with dashes and studded with Irish slang, his prose now abjures pictorial description almost entirely. In its place, song lyrics — "SHE’LL NEVER FIY-IND ANOTHER SWEET MAN LIKE ME" — and brief lists recalling Henry’s lost Irish life — "The wedding dress, the brooch, the glowing hair, the folds and tears" — punctuate the non-stop conversation, the asides and the aha’s of the American streets. This is particularly tough going for Henry, as a first-person narrator, who must describe his undying sex appeal, how he makes "women feel special," a little too often.

And the echoes of A Star Called Henry can be unnerving. Some are intentional — a wooden leg, that plaintive child’s cry — but too many images recur, especially among the book’s scant descriptive passages. These could be the faults of a "bridge" book, and some of the echoes may have relevance in the third and final installment. It’s hard to imagine Henry Smart reaching for anything less than the stars he continually confronts, but maybe next time out, Doyle will bring him back down to earth.

Roddy Doyle reads next Thursday, November 11, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner; call (617) 566-6660.