Hellfire—in all the right ways.
Thirteen lively stories in a first collection from novelist Gay (The Long Home, 1999, etc.), mostly about southern men tempted to run off with tempting young southern women.
The tales gravitate toward violence, both when they should and when they shouldn’t. In the title story, though, a widower abandons his nursing home (“a factory where they make dead folks and I ain’t workin’ there no more”) and returns home only to find that his house has been rented to an old nemesis; and a suicide is discovered in a couple’s field in “A Death in the Woods,” but why did the man choose here and how does the haunting of his ghost reflect the couple’s marital problems? “Bonedaddy, Quincy Nell, and the Fifteen Thousand BTU Electric Chair” is a bizarre and sometimes sweet love story that unfortunately does end with uncalled-for violence. The best of the bunch is “The Man who Knew Dylan,” a similar piece in which a man travels “into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens, where folks kept whippoorwills for pets and didn’t get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning” There, when he finds an intoxicating young woman who might be the Grim Reaper, she tells him, “‘I thought you looked like a man with a bridge on fire.’” “The Paperhanger” is another odd affair that leads toward murder, whereas in “Crossroads Blues” a man experiences the apathy of his ex-wife and the poetic mysticism of the Delta. The promise and intrigue of a bootlegger’s booty brings hope to a man’s doomed romantic prospects (“Closure and Roadkill on the Life’s Highway”), and another man spirals into violence and despondency after he shoots his wife’s dog (“Sugarbaby”). These stories are loud—lots of guns, lots of death—but the plot-heaviness isn’t a substitute for fine character and plenty of dialogue that’s as charming as it is wise.
Hellfire—in all the right ways.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-4088-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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