Smiley, a gifted novelist of family-relations (Born Blind, At Paradise Gate), goes murkily astray this time—in a Manhattan murder-mystery that probes, with talky stiffness, the inter-relations among an unappealing group of old Minnesota college friends, now all early-30s New Yorkers. (Not unlike The Big Chill set-up, but without the charm.) Denny Minehart and Craig Shellady, brother-like leaders of a not-quite-famous rock band, are found dead in the apartment they've shared for years with Denny's longtime lover, boutique-manager Susan Gabriel. The shocked discoverer of the bodies: Susan's best friend Alice Ellis—librarian, ex-wife of poet/prof Jim, and the novel's moody heroine. Whodunit? Was it another band-member, druggie Noah Mast, whose wife was sleeping with the charismatic, volatile Craig? Did something go wrong with a cocaine-selling deal arranged by another old pal, homosexual sound-man Ray? Or was the killer one of the many other people who had keys to the Denny/Craig/Susan apartment? Alice, a quiet type uncomfortable at the center of the ensuing tensions, mulls these possibilities, raking over past relationships—often in numbing conversations with strong, glamorous Susan. ("Well, doesn't all of this seem weird to you? The patterns of our lives formed twelve years ago! And they didn't basically change until now!") Alice also finds time to fall in love—cute talk, earnest sex—with botanist/neighbor Henry, even if (for unconvincing reasons) she can't bear to tell him about the murders. But then, while Noah is indeed arrested, Alice suddenly, intuitively knows that Susan committed the murders. ("Nonetheless, Alice knew that her adoration of her friend, and her anticipation of lasting, comfortable intimacy was greater than ever.") So this disturbing knowledge will mess up the Henry relationship. . . until a longwinded finale (Susan stalks Alice, Susan confesses), paves the way for a tinny, happy fadeout. Smiley extracts a few shrewd effects from the quiet, naturalistic approach to violence and grief: there's ironic, credible emphasis on what everybody eats and wears. Her prose is often stylish, thoughtful. But, unlike Barn Blind and At Paradise Gate, this novel is layered with artificial situations and implausible motivations—from Alice's tortured friendships to Susan's much-belabored murder motive (which relates to the undeveloped theme of the rock band's non-celebrity). Moreover, Smiley doesn't seem to know this world first-hand: details and dialogue lack authentic edges. A blurry, ambitious cluster of themes, then, never coming into focus—or rising above the murder-melodrama format.
Pub Date: March 1, 1983
ISBN: 1400076021
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
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
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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
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