A brilliant entertainment, and one of the few contemporary novels savvy enough to treat religious faith both seriously and...
Minutely observed and detailed analyses of both an endangered marriage and an unfulfilling affair dominate this witty, assured fourth novel from the Booker-nominated British author (A Stairway to Paradise, 1999, etc.).
Television director Simon Beaufort seems to have it all: a thriving (if artistically frustrating) career, a beautiful and devoted wife, Flora, and three delightful children. But his family goes on a brief holiday in France, and Simon encounters—and falls hard for—Gillian Selkirk, a poised accountant who offers him splendiferous sex without commitment (she prefers “autonomy”). Flora, vaguely sensing some absence in her life, flirts, as it were, with Catholicism—and St. John skillfully plays off Simon’s infidelity and guilt against what he labels his wife’s “harmless delusion”—as the net around Simon tightens, and a coincidental near-meeting with Flora’s old friend Lydia threatens the artificial double world he has built for himself. What one wants to call this story’s hit-and-run structure—a breathlessly readable succession of very short chapters that feature sparkling and suggestive dialogue—perfectly conveys the fragmented and puzzling character of even stable long-term relationships, and brings into amazingly vivid focus the bright personalities of (the really unexceptionable) Flora and her clever, inquisitive kids (both young adolescent Janey and solemn five-year-old Thomas are marvelous creations)—all the while making something equally risible, contemptible, and heartbreaking out of Simon’s confused yearnings to become both a satisfactory lover and a better husband and father. This novel’s ethical and narrative judiciousness may be inferred from just two of the many fortuitous near-aphorisms with which its pages fortuitously abound: “Sex, after all, is a lot more than it’s cracked up to be,” and “There’s a lot to be said for the rules.”
A brilliant entertainment, and one of the few contemporary novels savvy enough to treat religious faith both seriously and comically. Put this one on the shelf not far from Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark: Madeleine St. John is of their company.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7867-0756-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"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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BOOK REVIEW
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