At first glance, this seems to be the worst possible knockoff of 20th-Century Lit 101, but Hunt manages to infuse enough...
A mentally disturbed man’s attempts to help his institutionalized wife, as related by Hunt (The Impossibly, 2001) in a Faulknerian voice that succeeds better than one would have reason to expect.
Although the setting is Indiana, there is more than a whiff of Southern Gothic about this tale, basically a family saga about an unhappy farming clan named Summers. As seen mostly from the perspective (and in the voice) of the simple-minded Noah, the Summers people like your basic cold-blooded, upstanding country folk, neither terribly perverse nor terribly interesting in their own right. Noah’s father was a schoolmaster before he married and settled down to farm life; Noah himself never learned to read and write very well and seems never to have held a job of any kind (although he delivered mail briefly during WWII when postmen were in short supply). Most of his neighbors might look upon Noah as the village idiot, but he is really more in the nature of a seer—quite literally. Noah’s odd, apparently meaningless visions often turn out to be uncanny (he once saw a grandfather clock, for example, hovering over a field in which it lay buried), and the local sheriff made use of his insights more than once. But Noah’s great curse was his inability to help his wife Opal, committed to a mental institution and subjected to the systematic horrors of 1950s-era psychiatry (electrotherapy, etc.). Hunt’s depiction of the inner workings of Noah’s mind (often phrased in extremely long stream-of-consciousness sentences) takes some getting used to, but he becomes a credible and sympathetic character in short order, and his plight—and Opal’s—become equally vivid (and heartbreaking).
At first glance, this seems to be the worst possible knockoff of 20th-Century Lit 101, but Hunt manages to infuse enough life into these old modernist bones that by the end they dance like a Halloween skeleton.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56689-144-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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