Doyle spins a new tune

ELIZABETH GROVE-WHITE

Oh, Play That Thing:Volume Two of the Last RoundupBy Roddy Doyle Knopf Canada, 384 pages, $35'There are no second acts in American lives," Scott Fitzgerald wrote shortly before his death. But his potato-famine grandfather would beg to differ, as would the current crop of Irish writers like Frank McCourt and Nuala O'Faolain, who've ridden to the top of international bestseller lists with their triumphant two-part emigrant/immigrant stories. It's a simple enough formula: Act One is Ireland -- grim, impoverished and restrictive -- providing the necessary curtain-raiser for the redemptive American Act Two, in which our hero or heroine exorcizes Old World ghosts, rebuilds to American standards and achieves the happiness that Ireland has so persistently denied.