Not as good as Chang and Eng, then, but not bad at all. Strauss remains one of the most interesting and promising of younger...
There’s ample entertainment value in this rather desperately inventive second historical novel by the author of the highly praised debut tale Chang and Eng (2000).
This time, Strauss’s real-life subject is “Kid McCoy,” the welterweight boxer and confidence man whose duplicitous exploits paradoxically made his name synonymous with authenticity and honesty. His episodic story is told by a garrulous narrator whose identity is withheld until the closing pages (though many readers will surely guess it), and jumps back and forth between 1895, when the spindly Indiana youngster born Virgil Selby first drifts into prizefighting and “flimflammery,” and 1900, the year in which McCoy claims the welterweight title. In the hastily overstuffed final hundred pages, Strauss spells out the consequences of his antihero’s unsavory affiliation with grotesque Chinese con man Johnnie Gold (“a bush-league P.T. Barnum”), enduring obsession with his fiercely independent showgirl ex-wife Susan Fields, comeback bid (after losing his welterweight crown) in a challenge to heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett, and last-ditch attempt “to remake himself again” via “The Flimflam to End All Flimflams.” A lot of this works, because Strauss possesses a fluid, racy style and a knack for throwing quickly sketched colorful figures into the mix (e.g., veteran pug “Jabbing Jew” Joe Choinsky, H.L. Mencken–like reporter H.H. Measures, even nondescript fighter William York Tindall—who shares his name with an eminent Joyce scholar). President Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain make brief appearances, and Strauss’s re-creations of pugilistic spectacles and Tammany Hall political bloodbaths are acutely, amusingly detailed. The problem: too many of the boxing and flimflamming scenes are too similar, to the point of tedious redundancy. Even Strauss’s complex presentation of Selby/McCoy as a compulsive liar with very genuine immortal longings in him isn’t quite enough to make the chaos of colorful parts gel convincingly.
Not as good as Chang and Eng, then, but not bad at all. Strauss remains one of the most interesting and promising of younger American novelists.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94651-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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