By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.
Centered around an actual Memorial Day flood in 2015, Dinan’s first novel takes a mildly numinous, not so mildly pre-apocalyptic approach in following the lives of a young Texas Hill Country teenager and her loved ones as they fight to find each other, or at least survive, in their suddenly devastated landscape.
Supersensitive Boyd, 18, has an unusual, not necessarily welcome, ability: Like a dowser, she can sense others’ pain. Home-schooled, she lives with her mother, Lucy Maud, who has divorced but not stopped loving her father, Kevin, a classics professor now living in Austin and in love with one of his grad students. Boyd’s dearest friend and sort of lover is Isaac, a pre-med student at the University of Texas. Isaac and Boyd plan to spend the summer panning for gold in Boyd’s backyard and figuring out where their relationship is going given that introverted Boyd wants to stay in their safe, isolated rural world while down-to-earth Isaac yearns to leave and lead a more conventional, materialistic life. But when the rains pour down, ending a long drought, on the same weekend that Boyd’s maternal grandfather is getting married with her father as best man, Boyd and Isaac each end up alone. Isaac finds himself stranded high in a pecan tree with an array of usually wild animals while a river surges below. Sensing that he's in danger, Boyd goes searching for him. Along the way she meets a number of otherworldly characters caught in a quirk of time caused by the weather. (Think Dorothy in a nightmarish Oz, especially when a scarecrow comes to life.) Meanwhile, as Lucy Maud and Kevin set out together to look for their daughter, they struggle individually with their complex, unresolved relationship. If the storm is an omen of the climate risk the world currently faces, the dead cellphones beleaguering the characters represent communication breakdown on a deeper scale. Dinan breaks up the narrative with short, educational, sometimes didactic sections that illuminate the title by defining flash floods, bemoaning climate change, and explaining gold mining, among other topics.
By turns magical, harshly realistic, poetic, aggravating, and enthralling.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-443-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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
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