What Gordon sometimes lacks in subtlety is often made up for by the passion and energy of a questioning mind made all the...
Fans of the author will welcome these four novellas for their familiar themes and rich characters.
Gordon (The Love of My Youth, 2011, etc.) visits familiar territory from her 36 years of fiction, criticism and memoirs: faith sustained or lost, father figures and mentors, unreliable lovers and the power that two people exert or inflict on each other. For this collection, the pull of the past figures prominently. A former student of Simone Weil meets the French philosopher in New York in 1942 and is confused to encounter a brilliant intellect now imbued with mysticism and life-saving schemes and questions her own choice of family over career. In Fine Arts, a graduate student eases her path to scholarly achievement by sleeping with her married mentor. After he breaks it off, she discovers the beauty in her chosen artist’s work in Lucca, Italy, and acquires a fairy-tale benefactor. A 90-year-old man remembers himself as a callow high schooler in Gary, Indiana, chosen to introduce Thomas Mann at a lecture in 1939 and learning about imported cheese, literature and Nazi atrocities. In the title story, the best of these novellas, a wealthy elderly woman is visited in New Canaan, Connecticut, by the husband she ran from 50 years earlier. It begins with the nicely drawn fear and vulnerability aroused by a strange truck parked near her house. It’s the old beau’s van, and his surprise visit sparks memories of a time when love took her with him to his crowd in Ireland. There, his small lies led to a bigger one, amid other things that weren’t what they seemed. In retrospect, though, she wonders what she lost by fleeing home to safety and certainty.
What Gordon sometimes lacks in subtlety is often made up for by the passion and energy of a questioning mind made all the more vital as she ages with her characters.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-37743-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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