Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.
A half-dozen loosely interconnected stories chronicle life in Charlottesville in the grip of Covid.
Beattie taught for many years at the University of Virginia, and her familiarity with the town surrounding it shows in the references to the streets, shops, and local landmarks through which her anxious characters wander—masked or social distancing in some stories, as the collection moves from the early days of the lockdown through the turmoil over the Robert E. Lee statue in Lee Park. The decision to remove the statue and rename the park Market Street Park prompted the 2017 Unite the Right rally that ended with the death of a counterprotestor. Beattie’s protagonists are middle-class, liberal people appalled by the rally but ambivalent about “Lee’s visage [serving] as a magnet for all that was wrong with race relations, the past, the present, the future.” They are also preoccupied with personal issues. The woman living with her fiance’s father during lockdown (“Pegasus”) wonders how committed her absent lover is and worries about the father’s failing memory. He’s not the only one getting lost in familiar places; the confusion of several elderly characters serves as a metaphor for the larger bewilderment of people who once had a comfortable, secure existence and now feel adrift in an angry world. Of course, as memories unfold in “In the Great Southern Tradition,” “Alice Ott,” and “Monica, Headed Home,” we see that family relations, marriages, and friendships have always had tensions, but the furious outbursts in “Pegasus” and “Nearby” seem fueled by outside forces as well. Beattie allows her characters to speak for themselves as they grapple with old problems and the new normal. Their underlying malaise becomes explicit in the collection’s closing story, “The Bubble,” set in a nursing home housing several characters we have met previously. Charlottesville was once envied as existing in a bubble, thinks the facility’s head nurse, “but in Lee Park, that bubble had popped—as had her own protective bubble.”
Sharply focused work from a master of the short fiction form.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781668013656
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.
Many years after her older brother, Bear, went missing, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from the same sleepaway camp he did, leading to dark, bitter truths about her wealthy family.
One morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson—an Adirondacks summer camp owned by her family—it's discovered that 13-year-old Barbara isn't in her bed. A problem case whose unhappily married parents disdain her goth appearance and "stormy" temperament, Barbara is secretly known by one bunkmate to have slipped out every night after bedtime. But no one has a clue where's she permanently disappeared to, firing speculation that she was taken by a local serial killer known as Slitter. As Jacob Sluiter, he was convicted of 11 murders in the 1960s and recently broke out of prison. He's the one, people say, who should have been prosecuted for Bear's abduction, not a gardener who was framed. Leave it to the young and unproven assistant investigator, Judy Luptack, to press forward in uncovering the truth, unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are "cut out for this work." An unsavory group portrait of the Van Laars emerges in which the children's father cruelly abuses their submissive mother, who is so traumatized by the loss of Bear—and the possible role she played in it—that she has no love left for her daughter. Picking up on the themes of families in search of themselves she explored in Long Bright River (2020), Moore draws sympathy to characters who have been subjected to spousal, parental, psychological, and physical abuse. As rich in background detail and secondary mysteries as it is, this ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging novel never seems overplotted. Every piece falls skillfully into place and every character, major and minor, leaves an imprint.
"Don't go into the woods" takes on unsettling new meaning in Moore's blend of domestic drama and crime novel.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593418918
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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