Tosches would have us believe that he is Orson Welles, writing badly for dough and well for posterity. But Little, Brown...
From cultural critic and occasional novelist Tosches (Where Dead Voices Gather, 2001, etc.), a personal Commedia of errors that may not be the book of the millennium he aims for.
The plot turns on the original handwritten manuscript of The Divine Comedy, which has turned up in a secret room under the Vatican. A New York gangster has a shot at grabbing it, so who does he call to authenticate the pages? A “fictional” Nick Tosches, who coincidentally has published all the same books as the real Nick Tosches. Nick’s a shady figure with ties to the mob and a love of blackjack, but he also happens to have been obsessed with Dante for many years. Meantime, the story of the discovered manuscript is compelling, if often offensively vulgar, and the interplay between its thrill ride and a narrative history of Dante’s life makes for fascinating rhetoric. But the part of the novel everyone in the book industry has been waiting to read is the long rant against the publishing industry. About a quarter of the way in, Tosches makes an abrupt turn to lament the half-dozen conglomerates that have taken over (including his own publisher) and spends a few pages laying into senior editors (including his own). Is he really surprised by the sorry state of the book-business? Granted that he’s right (he is), then how is it that In the Hand of Dante, which he assures us no one will understand, has been published? None of this has anything to do with the Dante manuscript, and it’s disheartening to watch the same intelligence that produces “You would today be hard-pressed to find a senior editor in New York who had heard of Eliot’s The Sacred Wood, let alone read it” also descend to the lameness of “Fuck him. Fuck her. Fuck the other guy. Fuck you, whoever you are. Fuck you all.”
Tosches would have us believe that he is Orson Welles, writing badly for dough and well for posterity. But Little, Brown promises only that it will be “the most talked-about book of the decade.” No wonder he’s pissed.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-89524-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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