Fact-based fiction needs more imaginative transformation than it gets here.
Performance artist Kleine debuts with the bleak intertwined tales of a fourth-grader murdered by her mother and a narcissistic loser who shoots the movie star he’s been stalking.
The novel was “inspired,” the author tells us, by the creepy real-life love affair of would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley and Leslie DeVeau, who killed her daughter (a childhood friend of Kleine’s) and met Hinckley while both were patients in a psychiatric hospital. Unfortunately, the only character who comes to fictional life here is Tammy, an anxious 10-year-old at the end of 1980, when she relocates to Washington, D.C., and finds herself on the fringes of her new school’s social scene while younger sister Steffi fits right in and swiftly acquires a best friend, Kirin. Tammy’s mother and stepfather are stick figures of selfishness, leaving the girls to pick up and supervise their 4-year-old half brother after school, while Kirin’s mother, Valerie, is such a twitching mass of symptoms that it’s all too clear which mom will be shotgunning her daughter halfway through the novel. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Hackney (the Hinckley stand-in) grieves over John Lennon’s death and can’t understand why neither his parents nor anyone at the college where he’s stopped attending classes can see how special he is—never mind that he makes few efforts to demonstrate his specialness other than some creative bouts of lying to cover up his failures. The flat-affect prose doesn’t encourage us to feel any empathy for—let alone interest in—Jeffrey or anyone else except pathetic Tammy in this dour saga of alienation and unhappiness. It doesn’t help that the narrative whipsaws between Jeff’s growing fixation on starlet Amber Carrol and the interactions of the kids and parents in Tammy’s neighborhood, chronicled in chapters confusingly split among multiple points of view. After the two murderous denouements, the novel dwindles into a depressive anticlimax for Tammy and more delusions for Jeff and Valerie.
Fact-based fiction needs more imaginative transformation than it gets here.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-619-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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