Full of irony and contradictions, this compilation of contemporary short stories is a worthwhile effort.
Dermont’s short story collection, which follows her debut novel (The Starboard Sea, 2012), demonstrates the author’s versatility and sardonic humor.
The anthology includes 11 previously published stories and three new narratives. A mother and daughter travel to LBJ’s birthplace in “Lyndon” and engage in an unconventional tour that bridges the gulf between them. In the title story, a young man lives with his girlfriend’s mother and runs the family’s school for Southern etiquette while his girlfriend is indicted for securities fraud. This delightful tongue-in-cheek narrative, one of the best in the book, pits old-world manners against modern-day behavior. A woman rents herself out as a companion to elderly travelers following the death of her husband and reflects that, after 46 cruises, travel hasn’t liberated her as it has many of her companions. She also realizes that a recent action she’s committed may be the cause of a current crisis on board the cruise ship. Dermont changes tone in “Sorry, You are Not a Winner,” a narrative that highlights the incongruities between a group of rich, beautiful people playing children’s board games and a young woman who was once a part of the crowd and who now serves as their maid while caring for her terminally ill parents. Questions about faith, family and morality are explored in “The Master of Invoices,” and “Camp” examines amoral behavior among adults who are responsible for reinforcing values in the younger generation. Dermont delivers strong prose and intriguing characters who frequently defy stereotypical ideals. Although a couple of the narratives fail to live up to the high standards the other stories achieve, the overall effect is a tight collection that takes the reader in unexpected, often disconcerting, directions.
Full of irony and contradictions, this compilation of contemporary short stories is a worthwhile effort.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64281-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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