Compelling, although nothing quite jells into clarity.
It’s difficult to separate the problems of the prisoners from those of their keepers in this unrelentingly dark multilayered prison drama from Moore (One Last Look, 2003, etc.), told from the point of view of three women and one man.
After six months on the psychiatric staff at a woman’s prison in upstate New York, Louise is still struggling to adjust to the bleak conditions. At first, readers may wonder along with Louise’s coworkers why a woman with her credentials chooses to practice there, but the lonely, divorced Louise, whose only joy is her young son Ransom, carries her own psychological baggage. She becomes increasingly involved in the case of Helen, a particularly troubled prisoner/patient. Helen hears voices she calls The Messengers, and clings to the belief that she was protecting her children when she killed them. A victim of abuse that began in childhood and continued beyond marriage and childbearing, Helen also believes, with good reason, that her younger sister, given up for adoption by Helen’s mother, is now a rising Hollywood starlet. Helen begins writing letters to Angie, a pill-popping actress who coincidently is romantically involved with Louise’s filmmaking ex-husband Rafael. Louise becomes sexually drawn to a young prison guard, Ike. Although Ike has his own narrative sections, he remains a cardboard cutout of male attractiveness. After walking in on Louise and Ike in bed, Ransom tells Rafael that Ike accosted him sexually. Outraged, the never-fleshed-out but alluring Rafael whisks Ransom off to California, where Angie cares for him in dangerously haphazard fashion. Distraught, Louise begins to fall apart emotionally. Meanwhile, Helen slips deeper into psychosis and ultimately commits suicide. Angie, who has come to believe she is Helen’s sister, gets Ransom to admit he lied and brings him home to Louise, who has been fired from the prison and now misses it terribly.
Compelling, although nothing quite jells into clarity.Pub Date: May 7, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4190-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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
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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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