This resonant book is both provocative and gripping.
After a tragic accident—something that's alluded to early in the book but not explained until later—Jane Ashland's whole life begins to feel like it is spiraling out of control.
Jane's job as a professor of creative writing is no longer fulfilling, and she no longer has the patience to deal with academic wrangling, planning lectures, or grading papers. Similarly, despite having published several well-reviewed novels, she can no longer motivate herself to write. What’s the point? she wonders. The only thing that gives her even a modicum of pleasure is genealogy, and she has begun to compulsively research her family’s European ancestry. Over time, this passion builds to obsession, and Jane impulsively quits her job, sells her car, and moves out of her apartment. The plan, she tells her parents and colleagues, is to travel to Norway, meet a distant cousin she has never laid eyes on, and learn as much as she can about her family’s origins. But even before Jane arrives in Norway, things go awry. First, there’s her airline seat companion, Ulf, a zoologist who befriends her without knowing anything whatsoever about her circumstances. Later, when tensions with cousin Lars Christian’s family explode—she has told them nothing about the reason she gave up everything and landed on their doorstep, so they have no way to interpret her bizarre behavior—she tracks Ulf down and accompanies him to the mountains, where he is monitoring herds of musk ox. As the encounter unfolds, the reason Jane is so bereft is unveiled, and readers are made privy, in fits and starts, to her backstory. Told in a nonlinear fashion, the novel presents incidents in short spurts, with Jane's memories colliding in a jumble of recollections. The end result is gut-wrenching. And while the storyline and denouement are somewhat depressing, they can also be interpreted as an explication of deeply felt, raw emotion.
This resonant book is both provocative and gripping.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947793-06-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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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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