Three Words on the First Page

A boy stands under a lighted window in Joyce's Dublin, waiting for an old priest to die, and says three strange words over to himself in the dark. That is the first page of James Joyce's Dubliners, and John Banville thinks it announces everything that follows. He reads The Sisters as a genuinely frightening story: a child raised inside a church that taught him guilt before arithmetic, and a friendship with that priest that the grown-ups keep almost naming. Banville grew up inside that world himself, and he remembers what it asked of a seven year old. Then he tells you who this nameless boy grows up to be.