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OH WHAT A PARADISE IT SEEMS

Question: when are three or four John Cheever stories less welcome than one? Answer: when, as here, those three or four stories are fragmented and intertwined into a novella—an itchy, neither-here-nor-there form which, unlike the short story, doesn't frame the delicate late-Cheever melange (nostalgia, satire, fable, spirituality) with structural sureness. The principal story-line, recalling "The World of Apples," offers an elderly gentleman in love—or is it lust? Lemuel Sears, a twice-widowed computer-industry executive, spies beautiful real-estate woman Renee in a Manhattan bank, is swamped with reborn Eros ("She could have been the winsome girl on the oleomargarine package or the Oriental dancer on his father's cigar box who used to stir his little prick when he was about nine"), and is soon her insatiable lover; however, when Renee—an elusive sort dedicated to New School-style self-improvement—proves to be cruelly fickle, Sears promptly finds himself in a low-key, tender affair with. . . Renee's middle-aged doorman. (His "next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.") Is this love or lewdness? That's a familiar Cheever theme. And the intermingled subplots here involve another Cheever standby: clean, pure water as a symbol of the old verities, of love's cleansing force. Sears, you see, is personally funding an investigation into the polluting of Beasley's Pond up in Connecticut (he loves to skate there), so there is a series of black-comic suburban vignettes tenuously linked to the matter of the Pond: the story of the Italian barber who, poverty-stricken, is hired by the Mafia-like "organization" to oversee the corrupt-government dumping at the Pond; the story of the barber's neighbor Betsy Logan—who gets into a brawl with the barber's pushy wife at the Musak-ridden supermarket, who misplaces her baby on the highway, who finally uses desperate measures (fighting poison with poison) to stop the pollution at Beasley's Pond. And we're explicitly told how all the strands here should connect up: "The clearness of Beasley's Pond seemed to have scoured [ Sears'] consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination." Yet, despite some elegant stitchwork, Cheever never really overcomes the feeling that these are short-story fragments artificially brought together in an uneasy, uncharacteristically disjointed narrative; and, as a result, the risky maneuvers which are often magical in a seamless Cheever story—sudden jolts of black-comedy, wildly implausible twists of Fate—more often fall flat here. A failure, then? Perhaps. But, like Graham Greene's unsatisfying novella/fable Doctor Fischer of Geneva, this offers distinctive rewards along the way: a handful of moodily haunting images, a few choice ironies, much gorgeous prose—including an inspired, freewheeling sequence in which Sears explains to himself why being rejected by Renee is like being transported to a village in the Balkans. And, however flawed the overall composition here, Cheever readers will probably feel, quite rightly, that such genuine morsels of joyful art are too precious to pass up.

Pub Date: March 10, 1982

ISBN: 0679737855

Page Count: 92

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982

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THE SECRET HISTORY

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

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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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