The phony happy ending mars what is for the most part a cringingly funny satire of love and money among the artsy class.
From the opening scene in which an earthquake shakes Los Angeles, Brown’s tart second novel (All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, 2008), about a pair of hip Californians facing financial and marital collapse, couldn’t be more timely.
Rising filmmaker Claudia and indie rock star Jeremy married and bought their 1,300-square-foot bungalow for $600,000 during the height of the housing bubble. With a big movie contract pending for Claudia and an album deal in the works for Jeremy, the couple plans to be out from under the increasingly steep interest-only mortgage payments soon. Unfortunately, after a film Claudia’s written and directed tanks at the box office, her new contract dries up while Jeremy’s band dissolves before finishing an album. Moreover, Jeremy has not paid the mortgage for several months and now the bank won’t renegotiate the loan. As the possibility of losing the house looms, cracks appear in the marriage. Responsible, hardworking Claudia’s more conventional side emerges; desperate to keep the house, she takes a job teaching film at a private high school. Jeremy, who works fitfully as a T-shirt designer and takes pride in his bohemianism, which borders on irresponsibility, was already chafing at the demands of the house when the mortgage crisis arose. Before he met Claudia, he had been a music/art world darling in New York, the lover and muse of a now world-famous artist named Aoki. One of her paintings of him hangs in the bungalow, and he refuses Claudia’s request to sell it despite the needed cash it would bring. Instead they take in a tenant who sets the house on fire. By then Aoki, emotionally unstable but still alluring, has shown up to tempt Jeremy away from his marriage. A desperate Claudia is engaging in her own moral capitulation—falsifying a student’s grades to get a lucrative film deal from the girl’s father.
The phony happy ending mars what is for the most part a cringingly funny satire of love and money among the artsy class.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52403-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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