Skillful, intelligent, always readable but this time less-persuasive work from an appealing author.
Charismatic young playwright Luke Kanowski, escaping a dark family history to forge his own destiny in London’s Theatreland, heads the cast in a welcome if less sure-footed return to period heartache by talented British writer Jones (The Uninvited Guests, 2012, etc.).
Notably deft in her reconstructions of not-so-distant eras, Jones here tags Biba fashion, the Osmonds, T. Rex and a myriad other evocative details of the late 1960s and early ’70s as background to the four stage-struck hopefuls at the center of her fourth novel, each of them significantly molded by their parents’ influences. Luke has broken away from a grim home life—his father’s a boozy immigrant, his mother’s a long-term patient in the local mental asylum—after a chance meeting with two strangers, aspiring stage producer Paul Driscoll and student Leigh Radley. Paul and Luke are destined to become firm friends, while Leigh, caught between them, will become Paul’s girlfriend after a humiliatingly hurtful early encounter with Luke. Actress Nina Jacobs has survived the lifelong pressure of a competitive mother by walling herself in passivity. While Luke begins to find success as a writer, Nina is pushed by her mother into a relationship with Tony Moore, a manipulative stage producer of ambiguous sexual orientation. Tony not only marries Nina, but casts her in a play about a torture victim, which makes her a star—and bewitches Luke into wanting to save her. Jones’ gift for emotional intensity has not deserted her, but her material here is less beguiling than in her two first (and strongest) novels, The Outcast (2008) and Small Wars (2010). Nina is an unsympathetic character, and the psychology underpinning events develops in increasingly schematic fashion. Crises, broken promises and bruised hearts ensue, and although the story comes to rest in the right place, it never quite escapes its sense of staginess.
Skillful, intelligent, always readable but this time less-persuasive work from an appealing author.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229281-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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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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