Miss Welty's South, the hill country of Northeast Mississippi, is once again like its catalpa trees in full bloom. On the first page, the marvelous descriptive power which carries so much of her writing makes itself felt—"Then a house appeared on its ridge, like an old man's silver watch pulled once more out of its pocket." This is her first book in some fifteen years; a writer of short stories and shorter novels, this is her first attempt to transpose the minor work of art into a major achievement and one of its losing battles may well be its length, testing the patience of those outside the cult. Here and there, during this mighty get-together, the reunion of a family on the 90th birthday (she says 100th) of Granny Vaughn, some of it runs to grass. It's the occasion when Granny expects to "see all the great-great-grandchildren they care to show me" along with her clutch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Granny's mind sometimes slips, and well through this memorable day she's asking for her presents; they're all around her—a prayer plant or a new apron or a sodabox full of sage. The day is also remarkable in that after two years, one of the great-grandchildren, Jack, is being released from the pen—to join them and his wife and his baby (although for a time it seems he might lose them both to a lurching car—an episode which with its retrieval is one of the many comic scenes). He's not the kind to give up; nor is his wife Gloria (who grew up an orphan never knowing who was her father) nor is the former schoolteacher of Banner who attempted to block their marriage. She was the most embattled of them all. . . . Miss Welty once defined the novel as "reflections and visions of all life we know compounded through art." Along with her blood knowledge of the South which has earned those many comparisons with Faulkner, there is her cosmic vision—part innocence, part forgiveness ("the besetting sin" in this house), part comedy, an ever-flowing affection for all that walks and crawls and creeps, and in conjunction with the homemade pleasures, the more mysterious penultimates. They're all here.
Pub Date: April 13, 1970
ISBN: 0679728821
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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