Such thoughts are roused by a tiny new little book, a mere slip of a thing, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, from Kurt...
If, in modern times, melody could disappear from music and recognizable image from art, is it possible that the novel can also, at long last, grow free of its imprisoning burden of “story”?
As far back as 1927, E.M. Forster wished for that very thing, lamenting in Aspects of the Novel that “Yes- oh, dear, yes – the novel tells a story…[And] I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.” It may be that all true art struggles against the confines of its own medium – and the more intense the struggle, the greater the art. In fiction, the escape from “story” goes back at least to Laurence Sterne, with his hilarious blank pages in Tristram Shandy. And there was of course Gertrude Stein, who carried the effort about as far as possible, while Virginia Woolf strove valiantly in the name of truth against the fossilizings of tale. In our own time the “story-novel” has pretty clearly run out of steam, functioning no longer as art at all but, high-brow or low-, as a form of entertainment (or infotainment) entirely content within its old shoe of a medium. And yet maybe, as a result, something new is afoot – the stirrings again of the anti-novel. There’ve already been the “experimental” novels of, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet or the late Natalie Sarraute. But those, all art and no play, have grown dusty and are gone. So consider just a few recent treasures from current rebels against the old “he said, she said” novel – Julia Blackburn’s The Book of Color; Gordon Lish’s Arcade or How to Write a Novel; Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String; Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque; David Markson’s Reader’s Block. Little known? Little sold? Little recognized? Ah, yes, but their day may come.
Such thoughts are roused by a tiny new little book, a mere slip of a thing, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, from Kurt Vonnegut, that great and resilient writer who more than any other has labored to pierce the rusty armor of “story,” coming up with book after book of wit, depth, hilarity, profundity, grace, and sorrow. This little one is no exception, but you’d better grab it – it’s so very tiny – before it disappears altogether. Like, maybe, the novel.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-58322-020-8
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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