A witty but kindhearted academic satire that oscillates between genuine compassion and scathing mockery with admirable...
Beleaguered English professor Jason Fitger, the unlucky protagonist of the Thurber Prize–winning novel Dear Committee Members (2014), returns to Payne University to fight another day.
Schumacher (English/The Univ. of Minnesota; An Explanation for Chaos, 1997, etc.) abandons the epistolary style of her previous novel for a straight narrative but retains all of its acid satire in a sequel that is far more substantive and just as funny. Our malcontent professor Fitger has been promoted to chair of his deeply dysfunctional English department. But his dwindling domain is in the crosshairs of villainous economics chair Roland Gladwell, who is trying to push English out of the basement of his precious Willard Hall and—if a troubling new quality assurance program comes to fruition—out of the curriculum entirely. Fitger’s only allies in his turf war are his ex-wife, Janet Matthias, who is now sleeping with the school’s dowdy dean, Philip Hinckler, and Fran Ignatieff, his gladiatorial administrative assistant, who generally hates him. From here, Schumacher throws her accident-prone lead into an unceasing comedy of errors. Fitger’s arc includes defending his Literature of the Apocalypse class from accusations that it's “psychologically hostile,” an absurd series of quests to convince (read: bribe) his colleagues to sign off on a required “Statement of Vision,” and a simmering alliance with Marie Eland, chair of the Consolidated Languages department, who best understands his plight. “It is about staying alive for the length of your term,” she says. “Because this is a game for them—for the deans and the provost and the vice provosts: to cut us back and back and back and suppose what we will do. What do you name this? A blood sport.” Subplots involving students, among them a naïve freshman, a duplicitous teaching assistant, and an ambitious department intern, are slightly less acerbic, but the Shakespearean drama between departments and colleagues is popcornworthy.
A witty but kindhearted academic satire that oscillates between genuine compassion and scathing mockery with admirable dexterity.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54234-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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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