GlÅck pushes the envelope way too far as he attempts to use the history of a failed, would-be saint from the 15th century to explore his own romantic obsession in the 1990s. GlÅck (Jack the Modernist, not reviewed) admittedly embellishes the autobiography that Margery Kempe wrote during the 1430s to reveal the unhealthy psychology of this Jesus-crazed heretic. Margery is an upstanding woman, daughter of the mayor, wife of John, and mother of 14 children, who loses it when devils begin taunting her. But later, as she lies in the bed to which John has tied her because he's tired of her insane roaring, Jesus pays a visit, loosens her ropes, and inspires a passion that makes Margery swoon just looking at ``the semi-circles of his ass'' and the ``splayed tips of his long toes.'' Margery pretends to go on with her life, but all the while she's really waiting for Jesus in a heightened state of arousal. When he does show up ten years later, it's obvious there's going to be a whole lot of bumping and grinding going on. Unfortunately for Margery, Jesus is distant and cold (he absentmindedly counts his muscle twitchings during sex: `` `I spasmed eleven times,' he mused''), but this only makes Margery want him more. Classic victim mentality? Maybe. But GlÅck likes to think of it as Margery's modus operandi—she wants power, money, sex, prestige, and fame—and she needs Jesus to make the necessary connections to priests, vicars...even to God. If this isn't enough, the author sprinkles in his own unrequited-love story with a pretty little rich boy who refuses to make a commitment. Of course, GlÅck only gathers the strength to present his lover with a live-with-me-or-leave-me ultimatum when he sees how far Margery falls in her desire for the unattainable. Numbingly frenzied, frustrated, and futile.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1994
ISBN: 1-85242-334-X
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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