A matriarchal tale asks who can thrive in small-town America.
Three women—two white and one biracial—reckon with a Michigan hometown each thought she had escaped.
As this debut novel opens on fictional River Bend, “perched just above the state line in the soft crook of the St. Gerard River,” its citizens register the sounds of particular truck and car engines, signaling the comings and goings of the individual townsfolk: “Women, especially those of limited means, must learn to read the signs.” This shrewd line sets up a tale preoccupied with rural American limits and rupture, all marbled with prosaic details, such as meatloaf stretched with too much oatmeal. Mercurial Beth DeWitt has returned from North Carolina with two teenage children, stymied by job loss and divorce. Linda Williams, whom Beth once babysat, retreats from her own cratered marriage in Houston. And Linda’s mother, Paula, who bailed out of River Bend years ago when her kids were small, arrives to secure the divorce from her husband that her Wyoming lover wants for them. Still, the main strip of this tale runs through Beth, who's biracial, damaged by a childhood of macroaggressions and the surly neighborhood babysitter’s malevolent son. Beth's trauma sits astride this book, tucked into short italicized chapters which puncture the present-day story. That story, in turn, brims as Beth’s elderly father impregnates Linda, Beth resumes furtive sex with the town’s alcoholic married bad boy, who reeks of “cigarettes and Aqua Velva,” and Paula dithers with her still-besotted ex. No reader would expect these scenarios to end well, but McFarland knows her way through the murk. Angry women mud-fight in a public pigsty, and the Williams clan navigates a surprisingly recuperative farmhouse Christmas, scrolled out in one long tracking shot. Some of the writing is expository and belabored, but the flood hinted at in the title arrives and delivers. So, in the end, does the story.
A matriarchal tale asks who can thrive in small-town America.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54235-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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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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
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