An unorthodox detective story—the author’s fiction debut—that uses poetry to sharpen its edge.
A young man with an unusual gift is drawn into a multifarious conspiracy.
Poet Ball uses the language of his trade to breathe life into his inspired thriller about memory, truth and the unsound constructs in which we house these ethereal concepts. His protagonist, James Sim, is an unlikely hero—and possibly an unreliable observer—who is saddled with a peculiar talent for remembering things, a condition known as mnemonics. By extension, the odd turn of events that overwhelm him over the next seven days are described with a delicious dichotomy that alternates between linguistic precision and cinematic slight-of-hand. After he witnesses a man named McHale stabbed to death, Sim cautiously investigates the murder. Soon the amateur detective confronts his only lead, a man named Estrainger, who leaps from a high window to his death. Sim postulates that the murders are connected to a rash of ritualistic suicides outside the White House; each victim was carrying dire warnings from a revolutionary with the moniker “Samedi.” For his trouble, Sim is kidnapped by McHale’s doppelganger and taken to a “verisylum,” a baffling treatment center for chronic liars. It is here that Sim finds a familiar face, Grieve (aka Lily Violet), who may or may not have a look-alike of her own. The institution’s arcane rules of discourse are staggeringly tricky. “The idea is that when many lies are told, unfettered by immediate comparison to fact, they end up comprising a kind of truth. On that truth too lies can be based,” the second McHale tells Sim. Working within this unsteady structure, Sim struggles to understand his place in the scheme and identify the “plague of deafness” that Samedi promises to deliver on an ill-mannered world. Truth and beauty are largely absent in Sim’s story, and his otherworldly adventure comes to a vivid but ambiguous end. Yet for all the novel’s twists and turns, Ball is clearly in love with language, and this uncommon adventure is an apt delivery vehicle for his own substantial gifts.
An unorthodox detective story—the author’s fiction debut—that uses poetry to sharpen its edge.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-27885-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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