Broadening and deepening the speculations on personal destiny and societal straitjackets touched upon in Violet Clay (1978), Godwin now offers her best work yet: a striking triptych of three contemporary women-in-transit—whose lives "continue to bounce off one another, adding new evidence. . . ." Leonard Strickland—gentle, concerned with Truth—briefly reflects on his life choice of "dealing justly" with family and self rather than manning barricades for humanity at large. . . just before his fatal heart attack. So his widow Nell and his two daughters cluster warily, abrasively, after his death, before spinning apart to new, more stable, curiously renewing passages. Cate, still the family irritant though nearly 40, has yet to produce a pearl of "accomplishment": married and divorced twice, jolting erratically from job to job teaching English (once fired for leading little girls to block the Lincoln Tunnel in protest against the Cambodia bombing), she scorns Success yet would be "outstanding." (A legacy from scrupulous, retiring Leonard?) And Cate ponders these matters as she becomes the lover of Roger Jernigan, a raw, pragmatic pesticide "baron" who lives in a castle; eventually, however, fearing the warm soup of protective security, she'll refuse marriage and have an abortion: "Keep a space ready for what you want" even if you don't now know what it is. Meanwhile, in contrast, younger sister Lydia's life is one of tight compartments (or what Cate regards as a "table-model kingdom"). Mother of two boys, Lydia hones close to her "public image": she sheds nice husband Max because of her lack of "sufficient enthusiasm"; she acquires a degree in sociology, a gifted black woman friend, and a malleable lover; and she'll ultimately star in a local TV cooking show. As Lydia tells her boys: "There are things that life expects from you and things you have a right to expect. . . . Get yourself organized." And as for mother Nell, she's loyal and compassionate with the sad, silly, brave old friends of her circle—and she is gradually weaned back to self and the "mellow ecstasy" of simply "being nobody." Finally, then, the three women—steamrolling Cate, secretly vulnerable Lydia coiled to strike, Nell bolstering and resignedly coping—have a climactic go-round at the family beach cottage. . . which will be symbolically destroyed by an untended fire. With rich, full portraits, seamless philosophic musings, and loamy village humor—a major novel from a talented writer really hitting her stride.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1981
ISBN: 0345389239
Page Count: 548
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1981
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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