A wonderful commonplace book of wit and wisdom on snobs and aspiring snobs—there are no former snobs—disguised as a novel...
An archly amusing first novel that returns to the territory Fellowes staked out in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Gosford Park: class snobbery among England’s aristocrats and arrivistes.
This story of “a latter-day Cinderella” couldn’t be simpler. Egged on by her rapacious mother, estate agent Edith Lavery sets her sights on an available earl, lands him, leaves him for a dishy actor of no great eminence, and then wonders whether she wasn’t better off surrounded by a world that never accepted her as one of its own and a husband considerably slower and stupider than she is. Nor are the characters especially compelling; the nameless narrator, a well-born actor who floats through the tale as a suspiciously useful confidant and omniscient intelligence, is particularly devoid of interest, even when he’s becoming a husband and father. The distinction of the novel is in its practiced eye for class distinctions (e.g., “that fatal, diffident graciousness that marks the successful social climber”) and the long-bred behavior that keeps the aristocracy tethered in place despite the determined assault of numberless parvenus (so that the phrase “‘not quite a gentleman’” becomes “the stock response to original thought”). Edith’s tug-of-war with her quietly iron-willed mother-in-law, Marchioness Uckfield, over the dull but invincibly goodhearted Charles Broughton stands out from the narrator’s tireless commentary, but the commentary itself, as patient and tireless as Trollope’s in recording tiny social slights and oversights, is the real treat here. If you can call it a treat, since Fellowes’s merciless dissection of the snobs he adores, unfolding in a series of brilliantly epigrammatic paragraphs, is in cumulative doses tiresomely repetitious, even boring, in its insights.
A wonderful commonplace book of wit and wisdom on snobs and aspiring snobs—there are no former snobs—disguised as a novel that’s perhaps both too rich and too dry to take in all at a sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33692-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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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