In her second novel, Beattie's dessicated people—blunted, wobbling in the lassitude of vague guilts, playing their pinball impulses for bonanza relationships that never quite light up—again drift together in random accident from glossy suburbia to junky Manhattan. The marriage of ad-man John and wife Louise is eddying into nullity as John travels the highways through his week: from the Connecticut home shared with Louise and their two older kids; to the Rye, N.Y., home of John's alcoholic mother, where their youngest child has somehow been settled in permanently; to the apartment of mistress Nina (who works at Lord & Taylor) in Manhattan. John is only casually committed to Nina—until an incident at home drives him into fearful hiding: itchy, foul-mouthed, 15-year-old daughter Mary is shot from a tree by fat, ten-year-old son John Joel. (John Joel didn't know that the gun, given to him by a monstrous peer, was loaded, but he certainly hates his sister—something she calmly accepts while recovering in the hospital.) The shooting of Mary propels John right into Nina's arms, and it also causes ripples that lead to new arrangements for everyone: Louise tags after a woman friend; two friends of Nina's—grad-student Cynthia and lover Spangle (who has almost finished blowing his inherited money)—get back together; and others (a chattering prof, a kook magician) mill around amiably. As always, Beattie's zapping dialogue is extraordinary, and the landscape—seen through splintered vision and blurred through the blab of car radios—edges on a nihilistic madness. But while often sharply effective at short-story length, the spectacle of Beattie's people—immobile lumps endlessly falling in place on their pointed heads—is a claustrophobic, static one; only grad-student Cynthia, who teaches summer-school English to kids "too cool to care," provides a little welcome distance. Rather enervating, then, but also sad, bleakly humorous, and often chilling.
Pub Date: May 1, 1980
ISBN: 067973192X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980
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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