Unsettling, memorable, and—maybe perversely—very, very fun.
When Roupenian’s “Cat Person” was published in the New Yorker, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon. It's unheard of for a short story to go viral, but "Cat Person"—through a combination of impossibly sharp writing and impossibly good timing—had done it. A year later, Roupenian's debut collection proves that success wasn’t a fluke.
The 12 visceral stories here range from uncomfortable to truly horrifying and are often—though not always—focused on the vicious contradictions of being female. Roupenian’s women are as terrified as they are terrifying; sometimes the violence comes to fruition and sometimes it doesn’t, but the possibility is always there, bubbling under the surface. In “Bad Boy,” which opens the book, a woman and her boyfriend take in a stray friend after a breakup and begin incorporating him into their sex life in increasingly sadistic ways. In “Sardines,” an 11-year-old girl—who, unlike most fictional 11-year-old girls, is depicted entirely without sentiment, big-nosed and meaty-breathed—makes a wish "for something mean" on a defective birthday candle and creates a monster. “Cat Person” and then “The Good Guy,” which follows it, both its companion and its opposite, are the heart of the collection—both chronologically and in spirit—as complementary investigations of gender and power. (Roupenian’s depictions of the dynamics between men and women are infinitely nuanced, but the very short version is: It’s real messed up.) “Cat Person” is told from the perspective of Margot, a college student, who's on a date with Robert, who is 34 and makes her feel at once very powerful and very small. “The Good Guy” follows Ted, a nice guy—who is not Robert but also not so different from him—whose relationships with women could be characterized as a dance of mutual contempt. (It is, of course, more complicated.) Some of the stories are drawn, with startling and nauseating detail, from life; others veer toward magical realism or nightmares. All of them, though, are united by Roupenian’s voice, which is unsparing and unpretentious and arrestingly straightforward, so that it feels, at times, less like you are reading and more like she is simply thinking for you.
Unsettling, memorable, and—maybe perversely—very, very fun.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0163-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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"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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