One senses that Oates is working through deeply personal material here. I’ll Take You There may in fact hold important clues...
Oates’s 30th full-length novel is one of her most bizarre and unsettling: a monotonous, only intermittently dramatic exploration of a “brilliant” young woman’s quest for certainty and human connection, undertaken at a fictional university during the just-beginning-to-be-turbulent early ’60s.
We never learn her real name. But we are given detailed glimpses into the self-punishing psyche of an upstate New York scholarship student from a fairly dysfunctional German-American farm family. In the story’s brooding opening section, pointedly titled “The Penitent,” the girl’s longings for the mother she never knew and the sister she never had impel her to seek, then throw away, membership in a prestigious sorority. Little happens in these early chapters, which are portentously adorned with quotations expressing such arcana as Spinoza’s theories about the links between knowledge and moral action. There’s even less narrative in “The Negro-Lover,” a laborious account of “Anellia’s” (for this is the fictional name she gives herself) obsessive relationship with black philosophy student Vernor Mathieus, another of those soulless intellectuals who keep popping up in Oates’s novels in order to confuse the women who unaccountably adore them. The final section, “The Way Out,” contains more promising material: Anellia’s discovery that her vagrant father, long presumed dead, is in fact clinging to life, though dying of cancer, in Utah. She dutifully arrives there, to be informed by the “hunchbacked little doll-woman” who cares for him that she may speak to her father but is not permitted to look at him. Alas, Oates never develops this situation, and the novel trails off into an inconclusiveness that is momentarily vitiated by a surprising final sentence that suggests the otherwise unspecified character of the unnamed protagonist’s “narrative.”
One senses that Oates is working through deeply personal material here. I’ll Take You There may in fact hold important clues to the autobiographical impulses that appear partially to generate and shape her fiction—but it isn’t much of a novel.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-050117-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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