In The Music of What Happens, author Charles Fanning relates what it felt like to be a member of an Irish working-class community in a dynamic, expanding American city in the late nineteenth century. Irish immigrants John and Eileen O'Malley Farrell live in the Chicago South-Side neighborhood of Bridgeport with their three children: Jimmy, twelve, Mary, ten, and Margaret, five. Their family experiences turmoil and tragedy and responds with unrelenting endurance.

This is the coming-of-age story of young Irish Americans, the children of immigrants, who grow up in the 1880s in Chicago. The novel evokes and re-imagines 19^th century neighborhood communities from the inside. It renders challenges to those communities from tragedies both internal (failure to protect the least among them from destitution) and external (casualties in the undeclared war against British rule in Ireland and murder of a factory girl). The saving grace of art (Irish traditional music in this case) helps to heal community members affected by the tragedies.