Wideman's latest novel picks up where the title story in last year's Fever left off—it's a dense and rage-filled meditation on the bombing of a houseful of blacks in West Philadelphia in 1985. The first half of this intense, poetic narrative concerns one man's personal struggle to find a rumored survivor of the conflagration—a boy named Simba Muntu, whose fate somehow seems linked to his own. For the past ten years, Cudjoe has enjoyed self-exile on a Greek island, trying to forget his string of failures as father, husband, friend, and Afro-American. Having sat out the political struggles of the 70's, he's become obsessed with the fire in Philly, and the image of a screaming, naked boy running from the flames. Cudjoe's research includes interviews with a former member of the so-called MOVE cult; a mouthpiece for the mayor, who was one of the handful of blacks at Penn with Cudjoe; and with a bunch of hoopsters courtside in West Philly. Midway through the novel, however, the fictive perscoa breaks down, transforming Cudjoe into a sort of Everyblackman, including the author himself. Wideman's discursive narrative reflects on his effort to stop time with this ostensible fiction, pausing long enough to consider the tragedy of his adolescent son's incarceration for tour. der. There's also the nagging suspicion that, in this mix of fact and fiction, he's just writing "clever, irresponsible, fanciful accounts of what never happened, never will." Which brings him to J.B., the city's source for information on the MOVE household. Now a "funky derelict" in Center City, this crazy, Rasta-fied street-person indulges a paranoid vision of genocide while hustling for quarters until some white kids set him on fire. Plagued by doubt and guilt, Cudjoe never Finds the boy—but at a vigil for the victims he does pledge, "Never again." Ultimately, this is a tale of survival in which the author himself finds redemption in his art. With its dark and cynical humor, this metafiction will disturb as many readers as it dazzles.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 061850964X
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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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