Price (The Wanderers, Bloodbrothers) left the Bronx behind with Ladies Man, putting all his remarkably pent-up novelistic energies onto the shoulders of increasingly articulate but shudderingly jumpy young men—the newest of which is Peter Keller, this book's narrator and (in a way) only character. Peter is the first college grad in his lower-middle-class Yonkers family—and as if that is some obscure sin, he promptly sabotages a brightish future by taking demeaning jobs (the Post Office, telephone solicitation). Then, to provoke his wimpy father and stepmother even further, Peter gets himself into real trouble by making bomb threats on the phone. He's caught, probationed—and, in the worst of several plot-lurches here, he's rescued by his friend Fat Jack, who (as department chairman) hires Peter to be a freshman-composition instructor at his alma mater in upstate New York. And there, in the small college town, Peter comes to meet older-woman Kim Fonesca—who's separated from husband Tony (a streetwise yet failed writer also on the faculty), who writes stories herself (more successfully than Tony), but who soon reveals that she needs a regular beat-me-then-stroke-me cycle from men. Hall a dozen times in this longish book, then, Price fastens onto a meld of intricate emotional needs—ambition, masochism, self-destruction—and astounding hysterics: Peter with his parents; Kim's sexual requirements; Peter's obsessive need to never let things well enough alone; Tony's desperate search for his once-glimpsed promise. Each time, however, the tension and energy collapse: each emotional drama gets caught against the wall as Price revolves the door too fast. And, since everyone in the novel—like Peter—turns out to be an obscure sinner-and-atoner, a whining monotony eventually takes over. Still, there are wonderful pages here: Price in his junior-Lenny-Bruce suit halls clown everything second-rate in extraordinary paragraphs of description; Peter at his best recalls some of Philip Roth's men, who are never unaware of how terribly they are mucking things up. And, though flabby and badly timed as a novel (the good climax comes far too late to be truly effective), this is grimly involving in fits and starts—and evidence of a stretching, growing, if problematic talent.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0312566514
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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
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