The best kind of satire: barbed and hilarious, but suffused with compassion.
Gavin's exceptional debut collection, set mainly in southern California, harkens to an earlier literary Los Angeles, that of Nathanael West, who, in The Day of the Locust, called Hollywood a "dream dump...the Sargasso of the imagination."
Gavin's bleakly funny, inventive stories feature hapless men caught between dire, pitiless reality—busted loves, dead parents, stillborn careers—and a golden (or at least spray-paint–gilded) mythology of manhood and of success that they can neither believe in nor bring themselves (quite) to throw out. Several stories feature young men making disastrous decisions and then following them to their conclusions in a way that would seem bathetic except that these young men, not having the consolation of delusion, steam toward misery with eyes open and mordant wit intact. There's the impoverished 20-something in "Bermuda" who gets himself fired from his job as a Meals on Wheels deliveryman so as to chase his reluctant beloved to her new job teaching music in paradise. He does this not to win her back—that's not in the cards, and he knows it—but because he sees that the only way out of the narrative he's foolishly invested so much in is to keep spiraling down to its humiliating end. In "Elephant Doors," an assistant to a mercurial, Belgium-obsessed quiz-show host is made to wriggle through a doggy door in the house of his ex-wife on a commando mission that cannot end but badly. The protagonist of "Illuminati" is a battered screenwriter still trying, long after the glory has faded, to nourish both himself and the "exalted visions I had of my future" off the proceeds from his one payday—for a "multi-ethnic buddy cop adventure comedy" called Hyde & Sikh. The poignant finale is a diptych about father-and-son toilet salesmen, the old man a veteran who feels most at home traversing the freeways, the son a fish hopelessly out of water, both bereft after the slow death by cancer of the woman—mother and wife—they loved.
The best kind of satire: barbed and hilarious, but suffused with compassion.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4931-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
PROFILES
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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