The way we live now, assessed with rue and grace.
Ten stories by bestselling novelist Sittenfeld (Eligible, 2016, etc.) probe the fissures beneath the surfaces of comfortable lives.
Donald Trump bookends the collection, as an alarming candidate in “Gender Studies” and an upset victor in “Do-Over.” His unexpected election suits the characters’ sense of the ground shifting underneath them, often due to false assumptions. Sometimes the mistaken ideas are deeply humiliating: The discontented wife in “The World Has Many Butterflies” discovers that the man with whom she’s been sharing bitchy assessments of fellow members of their affluent Houston social set is not the soul mate she thought and has been judging her by the conventional standards she believed they both despised. Sometimes they’re oddly liberating, as when the annoyingly perky wife and mother in “Bad Latch” proves to have some gumption to back up her chipper proclamations. But even the most positive stories have an undercurrent of unease. The protagonists of “Off the Record” and “The Prairie Wife” feel overwhelmed by the demands of parenthood; it’s probably not a coincidence that both are also grappling with mixed feelings about celebrities whose lives seem so much more exciting and important than theirs. Sittenfeld adroitly threads themes of disenchantment and perplexity through a group of stories whose characters, despite their reasonably secure middle-class professional status, share a feeling that their lives haven’t turned out the way they expected. Occasionally the plotting can be a little pat. The predictable unmasking of the narrator’s secret texting correspondent in “Plausible Deniability” somewhat mars a sad self-portrait of a man painfully aware of his inability to sustain meaningful personal relationships. But in the collection’s best stories, such as “Volunteers Are Shining Stars,” even a slightly lurid denouement feels true to the protagonist’s fierce resistance to points of view that challenge her own closed-off perspective. Sittenfeld’s own perspective throughout is compassionate without being sentimental, hopeful without being naïve.
The way we live now, assessed with rue and grace.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59286-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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