Rueful and kind, akin to both Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver in humane spirit and technical mastery.
The much-anthologized Poissant justifies his status as a favorite of the literary quarterlies with this debut collection of unsparing yet warmly empathetic stories.
It’s no small feat to elicit understanding for a man who throws his teenage son through a window when he finds out the boy is gay, but Dan Lawson’s first-person narration in “Lizard Man” makes his grief and regret so palpable that we hope his decision to seek reconciliation at the story’s end will be followed through. It’s characteristic of Poissant’s sure hand that Dan reaches this decision via a visit to the house of a friend’s recently deceased father, which culminates with the release of an enormous alligator into a golf club pond: The bizarre circumstances give rise to a moving revelation of forgiveness delayed too long. Mistakes that can never be amended also torment the protagonists of “Me and James Dean,” “Nudists” and “The Disappearing Boy,” though in each case, Poissant holds out hope that the simple human ability to move on can at least partially heal many wounds. That hope is most touchingly, albeit tentatively expressed in “The Geometry of Despair,” a two-part tale of a couple painfully at odds after their infant daughter’s crib death. But it would be misleading to suggest that Poissant’s work is consistently affirmative; “The Amputee,” “The End of Aaron” and “How to Help Your Husband Die” are overwhelmingly sad, the more so because their characters are drawn with such tenderness. Two short, overstylized pieces, “Knockout” and “The Baby Glows,” are the author’s only missteps, but perhaps they were warm-ups for the delicate balance between allegory and realism achieved in “What the Wolf Wants.” The collection closes with the title story, which follows Dan on a frantic cross-country drive to see his son, dying of AIDS in California. Once again, Poissant declines to reassure but finds beauty in our imperfect strivings toward love and connection.
Rueful and kind, akin to both Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver in humane spirit and technical mastery.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2996-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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