Makkai strikes a smartly absurdist tone as her characters nervously await impending doom from the uneventful Y2K bug, but...
Two married couples find themselves cohabitating in a guesthouse on the rich—and possibly haunted—estate of Laurelfield, once an artist and writer’s colony.
In her sophomore novel (The Borrower, 2011), which starts in 1999 and rewinds in four parts through the decades to 1900, Makkai takes us on a tour of the house's power over its owners and the artist residents of decades past. She first closely follows the marriage of Doug and Zee, which has been upended by financial concerns and unfulfilled career ambitions. Cash-strapped, they have moved to a house on Zee’s mother’s estate in order for Doug to finish his monograph on the poet Edwin Parfitt, who was luckily once a resident of the artist’s colony. But secretly, instead of doing his work, Doug is writing books in a formulaic middle-grade series for a couple of grand a pop. Zee, a Marxist theorist in the English department at the local college, is desperate to get her husband a job and sabotages the career of a curmudgeonly older professor in hopes that Doug will get his spot. Meanwhile, the owner of the estate, Zee’s mother, Grace, allows her second husband's son, Case, and daughter-in-law, Miriam, to move into the guesthouse with Doug and Zee, further weakening an already fraying relationship. These guests of Laurelfield are complex, trapped not only by the estate, which has a complicated history and dark secrets of its own, but by their own problems and decisions; as Makkai explains, “They had come to Laurelfield to face their lives and their marriage and the end of the millennium. Any number of explosive things.”
Makkai strikes a smartly absurdist tone as her characters nervously await impending doom from the uneventful Y2K bug, but while the novel is both funny and smart at times, Makkai fails to make the estate the foreboding character it needs to be to both ground and uproot these privileged characters who can't see how lucky they are and how self-absorbed their lives have become.Pub Date: July 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-525-42668-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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