A sad, touching tale of friendship and a smart, subtle dialogue on just where a culture’s stories come from.
Whiting winner Nunez (A Feather on the Breath of God, 1995, etc.) spins a moving tale about the unlikely friendship between a recently successful young writer and the old neighbor who seeks her.
On the publication of her first book, the unnamed narrator begins to receive letters from friends and old fans. Some are well-wishers she once knew, while others want advice or assistance in becoming writers themselves. Rouenna is both, a woman who grew up in the same Staten Island project, but whose life took a dramatically different turn when she became a nurse and went to Vietnam. At first, Rouenna asks for help in writing her life story. The narrator instinctively refuses, but a relationship nevertheless ensues. Only when Rouenna commits suicide, however, does the narrator—recently preoccupied by a failed romance of her own that sent her running to New England to teach, with periodic visits to Rouenna down south—begin to reflect on the meaning of their friendship. Pleasing though the story of this friendship is, the subtext of Rouenna’s many harrowing tales of Vietnam is more interesting, most of the language and tension in these sections coming from the vast amount of Vietnam literature that the narrator admits to having studied. Vietnam, it seems, is America’s repository of trauma. The narrator worries that the real event may be buried under its many literary uses, but this reservation does not prevent her from pressing it into service as well. Rouenna is real, but she is also the narrator’s sharer; Rouenna’s possible post-traumatic stress disorder is kin to the chrysalis that the narrator crawls into when her romance falls apart. Rouenna’s death allows the narrator to transform her completely into a character who is at once another person and a mirror image of her own haunted self.
A sad, touching tale of friendship and a smart, subtle dialogue on just where a culture’s stories come from.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-25430-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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