Uneven mix of silliness and insight that doesn’t quite coalesce.
The third from Haynes (Chalktown, 2001; and Oprah-pick Mother of Pearl, 1999) is a family drama mixed with gothic comedy set in rural Mississippi circa 1974.
Having sold his successful business out west, 70-year-old Willem Fremont heads back to Purvis, Mississippi, to find the homestead he abandoned in his youth, land now owned by the Till family. Bruno Till has returned from Vietnam with a spinal injury that keeps him housebound while his wife Leah, an educated girl from suburbia, works the farm. The two have all but stopped communicating, trapped by their individual insecurities and longings. Meanwhile, Bruno’s obese and hapless younger brother Sonny is building a shrimp boat in the backyard of the house next door, where he lives with their mother Eilene, who feigns deafness to cope with her furious—and understandable—disappointment in her sons. Down the road, Alyce Benson manages the motel where Willem takes a room while Alyce’s no-good husband Joe chases women and commits petty thievery. Alyce also sells vacuums door-to-door, and her encounter with the lonely Bruno sets the stage for a blow-up between Bruno and Leah. Bruno then moves out, unaware that Leah is pregnant. While he waits for Leah to ask him back, she mistakenly assumes he is romantically involved with Alyce. Although Willem is the title character, readers will be less drawn to his struggle with panic attacks and his burgeoning romance with prickly Eilene than they’ll be to Bruno and Leah’s troubled marriage—portrayed with delicacy and depth as the two find their way back together. On the other hand, Sonny is a buffoon and Joe Benson a cardboard villain whose violent downfall is treated as cartoon comedy. Haynes depicts some scenes so carefully they become sluggish. Her Mississippi is chock-full of cuteness and caricature, but Bruno and Leah are riveting and irresistible.
Uneven mix of silliness and insight that doesn’t quite coalesce.Pub Date: May 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3849-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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