Prose at its poetic best.
Foulds, who won England’s 2008 Costa Poetry Prize for The Broken Word, has written a dreamy fictional account of the year and a half when young, not-yet-famous Alfred Tennyson lived in close proximity to the mental hospital near Sherwood Forest where his brother was incarcerated along with “peasant poet” John Clare.
In the 1830s, High Beach is run by Dr. Matthew Allen, a pre-Freudian who prophetically uses what he calls “unbosoming” about the past to cure patients, particularly those suffering from melancholy. Allen, whose early life had its share of darkness, is educated and erudite. He is thrilled to have a distinguished if out-of-style poet like John Clare among his patients. Unbalanced Clare still finds moments of peace in nature and while visiting a nearby gypsy camp. But he is also increasingly delusional. Clare is moved to the lodge for more severe cases after he violently crashes the wedding of Allen’s oldest daughter, a wedding where Alfred and Septimus Tennyson are invited guests. Since Tennyson has taken a house near the asylum to be near his almost catatonic brother, Allen’s 17-year-old daughter Hannah soon develops a romantic crush on the young poet. Whether this infatuation is fiction or fact, Foulds captures Hannah’s inner life—and all the characters’ inner lives for that matter. Although polite, Tennyson barely notices Hannah, too deeply mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, who will become his muse. Without personal savings and desperate for money, Allen invests and loses a great deal of Tennyson’s money on an invention that doesn’t work. Tennyson writes and mopes. John Clare sinks deeper into distress until he finally leaves the institution and walks home to northern England, where he will spend the rest of his life in a state-run asylum. Although Hannah shifts her romantic fantasies to an aristocratic patient before she accepts that happiness can be found with a realistic suitor, plot matters less here than individual moments, each fully realized and deeply felt.
Prose at its poetic best.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-14-311779-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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