This is a big character-driven epic, though it’s overinflated in its pronouncements about its setting.
A group of young men and women aggressively affected by the post–9/11 world reconverge in their Ohio hometown.
Markley’s (Tales of Iceland, 2013, etc.) flagrantly symphonic debut novel is effectively four linked novellas, with each section circling around a high school friend or acquaintance of Rick, who was killed in action in Iraq. Each person has hit on hard times in their 20s, and on one evening in their hometown of New Canaan, they’re laboring to set things right. Bill has an omnivorous drug habit and is hauling a plainly illicit but unidentified (until the climax) package north from New Orleans; Stacey wants to confront the homophobic mother of her high school girlfriend; Dan is an Afghanistan war vet who wants to catch up with an old flame; and Tina has a score to settle with the jock who sexually abused her in high school. Markley is a knockout storyteller, infusing each section with realistic detail, from the drudgery of Walmart work to war to the fleeting ecstasies of drugs to violence, especially self-harm. (Tina’s section is especially tough reading on that last front.) High school, Markley writes, provided “stories of dread and wonder you could wrap whole novels around,” and he’s followed through. There's an unsettling feeling, though, that while he’s mastered complex characterization, it’s often in service of simplistic broader portraiture about the Rust Belt. New Canaan, “sclerotic in every capacity,” is doom-and-gloom to the edge of caricature: Its economy is rotted and shored up on meth and disability checks, its community reduced to pro-Trump resentment and anti-Muslim anger. The culture Markley describes unquestionably exists, and strong novels about America’s underclass are lamentably thin on the ground. But this novel is best appreciated as a set of portraits rather than (as the title suggests) a definitive statement about an entire state.
This is a big character-driven epic, though it’s overinflated in its pronouncements about its setting.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7447-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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