In this absurdist literary mystery, everyone's motives are suspect and open to interpretation.
A satiric campus novel from an editor at the Atlantic.
Anna Brisker is a disappointment to her wealthy, status-obsessed parents and to her thesis adviser at Collegiate, who feels she's not taking her dissertation, "an intellectual history of inspiration," seriously. But when Anna unexpectedly crosses paths with Helen Langley, the disinherited niece of an author who famously stepped away from the limelight, she uncovers a way to finish her dissertation and show up her family. According to Helen, Freddy Langley didn't have writer's block prior to his death but continued writing long after he disappeared from public view. If Anna can access Freddy's notebooks, she could finish her dissertation and earn back the respect of her adviser. Soon, Anna is embroiled in a game of literary detection that's spurred, like all good detective stories, by a combination of curiosity, lust, and petty revenge. Does Helen actually have feelings for Anna, or is it all an act? Can Anna outwit the other Ph.D. student sniffing around her project? And is it ever possible to determine an author's intentions by reading the record they've left behind? In her debut novel, Lapidos writes a scathing come-up of academia and criticism, poking fun at Ivy League hangers-on and book critics alike. In Anna, Lapidos has created a dry and distant narrator with a penchant for Pop-Tarts and metacriticism. Although the novel is often wry and observant, the philosophical puzzle at the heart of the book feels hollow, with little at stake beyond inviting readers to judge characters designed to be harshly judged. Both Anna and Helen have the privilege to stand at a remove from art and critical production thanks to the intervention of family money. But ironic distance only takes criticism—and art—so far.
In this absurdist literary mystery, everyone's motives are suspect and open to interpretation.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48055-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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