When we disbelieve what others could do, we end up disbelieving what we could do ourselves. That's how we're punished for our failure to imagine." That's Kosinski's credo, so he continually tries to stir our imaginations by exploring perverse, violent, creepy behavior—and, at their best, his terse pageants of lust and cruelty do lure us in and catch us accepting or even being turned on by primal or decadent doings. Here, however, the combative and sexual escapades of Kosinski's latest cool brute—nomadic, immigrant polo-player Fabian, "an outlaw from the league of crusaders, inquisitors, and censors of sexual conduct"—never seduce, rarely fascinate, and frequently seem merely dull or laughable. Fabian's roving polo-field encounters (he travels around in a horse-carrier-van) include some violent, even fatal one-on-one duels, but the minutely described action verges on an inappropriate romanticism and dilutes the impact; moreover, Kosinski belabors the dubious metaphor of "Riding Through Life" mercilessly—with Fabian even writing controversial books about horsemanship that obviously parallel Kosinski's controversial books about life. And the erotic exploits here seem desperately debased, though they do move in a sort of progression from lust to romance: first there's kinkiness galore with a half-way transsexual (female from the waist up), then a threesome with a horse and a Southern-belle horsetrainer (she's a black passing for white), then a quickie affair with a fat girl who commits suicide when Fabian abandons her, and finally Vanessa—a riding-student heiress whom Fabian deflowers at a public-sex club and winds up loving tenderly and selflessly. It will probably be noted that Fabian is somewhat more humanized than other Kosinski outlaws, but the apparent attempt to make him a tortured hero ("The gall of life. . . fell on him with all its futile weight") is an unseemly, sentimental failure. If Kosinski wants to start getting sympathy for his alter-egos, he'll have to stop writing shock-a-thons to fit his thematic formula—which may be a good idea, considering the lumbering obviousness of this latest effort.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0802135676
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979
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
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