Begley's prize-winning Wartime Lies is followed by this fastidiously (and sometimes artificially) crafted novel that chronicles the life—and the death by suicide—of a talented and successful man who was born a Central European Jew, survived WW II, and emigrated to America with his parents in 1947. No surname is given for this character named Ben, whose war- bedraggled parents found shelter in New Jersey, who by merit of his sheer braininess got into Harvard (in the Eisenhower-era 50's), and who surprised his classmates afterward by choosing to become not a writer but an investment banker instead. A rise in social class came with Harvard, with money, with success—and with an early but doomed marriage to the widowed, older, and beautiful Rachel, mother of two young daughters whom Ben will raise (and love) as if his own, and the dwindling of whose affection as the girls grow older will seem to Ben as deep a loss as any in his life. Exactly what's missing at the secret heart of the suave and worldly Ben may never be made entirely clear: what terrible loss it is that drives him toward despair even as he jet-sets to Paris, Tokyo, and Brazil as the hugely influential coordinator and bringer-to-fruition of vast international banking deals—and as, along the entire way, he looks for fine food, sex, and love, whether with young girls in Rio or with the married and elegant and psychologically uncertain Veronique in Paris, his passionate affair with said Veronique being star-crossed and doomed in such a way as to become the slightly-on- the-edge trigger of Ben's own highly dramatic final despair and last end. Often compelling if also frequently mannered: American saga of an immigrant's rise to the outward trappings of a patrician elegance, confidence and wealth, while the empty winds of hollowness and despair visit the heart inside.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41511-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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