An engaging collection of varied characters, if varying degrees of substance.
The veteran short story master explores the peculiarities of summer life among well-off and often emotionally unwell Maine denizens.
Beattie (Mrs. Nixon, 2011, etc.) helped set the template for minimalist fiction in the 1980s, but she’s roamed stylistically since then, and these 15 lightly linked stories are as varied as the moods of their lead characters. A trio of stories centers on Jocelyn, a teenager sent to live with her aunt and uncle while her mother recovers from surgery for Lyme disease; her struggles in a writing class echo her need to develop a mature sense of her world’s complexity. Sometimes Beattie imagines that world as light and quirky, as in “Elvis Is Ahead of Us,” in which teens discover a room full of Elvis-bust lamps in an unoccupied house. Elsewhere, the milieu is darker and more absurd, a place where one man is killed after accidentally rousing a nest of yellow jackets and another is flung over a cliff by a storm during his wedding. What unifies these stories outside of their settings is Beattie’s nuanced understanding of relationships: at her best, in “The Stroke,” an aging husband and wife preparing for bed discuss their love-hate feelings toward their children, casually grooming each other while musing about “how lovely it would be to just grab the clump of them and cut them out.” Some pieces read like sketches with promising characters but little movement: a 77-year-old writer discusses poetry with an IRS agent, a doctor reminisces about her life in New York before moving north, an author interviews a local for a book about “people who have negative effects on other people’s lives.” A full novel on Jocelyn might be more fulfilling, but Beattie clearly enjoys wandering around the neighborhood.
An engaging collection of varied characters, if varying degrees of substance.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0781-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
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"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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