Simpson’s stories pack a quiet emotional power that extends beyond their pages.
Time is the essence of this spare, subtle short story collection.
Two middle-aged women, friends from high school who haven’t seen each other for years, ride the train together from central London to the end of the line to recover a lost pair of reading glasses and, along with them, their old, easy friendship and spontaneous sense of adventure. A long-married couple, their relationship buffeted by bitterness and betrayal, find themselves the youngest travelers on a package tour to see Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in Berlin and, as the shared experience crumbles the emotional wall between them built by entrenched grudges and fears, find their way back to each other as old age approaches. A prosperous lawyer in London’s financial district—on his second marriage, to a woman around the age of the daughters from his first marriage—takes the teenage son of an acquaintance to lunch to persuade him that law would be a wise course of study, yet, as the lawyer reflects back on the course of his own life, his choices, and their consequences, its wisdom seems less clear. The nine stories in Simpson's (In-Flight Entertainment, 2012, etc.) sharply written collection carry titles that reflect a sense of place (“Moscow,” “Arizona,” “Berlin,” etc.). But, perhaps to a greater degree, the stories concern time—the effects of its passage, the disappointments it brings, the opportunities for growth it offers. Too, they grapple with issues of gender—especially incisively in the sly, clever “Erewhon”—and touch on the topics of art, literature, and economic and social inequality. And although Simpson’s stories are timely and rooted in their British milieu—strongly evoking the personal and cultural struggles of today’s middle class—they are also far-reaching and timeless, addressing matters of loyalty and mortality that are universal and deeply human.
Simpson’s stories pack a quiet emotional power that extends beyond their pages.Pub Date: June 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49307-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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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