An uneven road-trip tale that attempts to take readers straight to the heart of America.
In this debut novel, a lost man finds that the best way to get to the facts is through fiction.
Following college, Landfair’s unnamed narrator buys a motorcycle that he doesn’t quite know how to ride. He resolves to find himself by exploring his native land and learning about its character. However, neither his years as a benchwarmer for his college baseball team nor his ROTC training adequately prepare him for the harsh realities of life on the road. There are bitter winters to contend with, highway robberies, homelessness and all manner of other hardships. The protagonist’s impetus for his journey seems to stem from unfulfilled dreams of glory, and not from a deep-rooted desire to better understand the U.S. of A. Yet he rarely reexamines his quest, even when adversities mount. Although others might have turned back and sought comfort with friends and family, he presses on, eager for the next adventure. Along the way, he picks up odd jobs—as everything from a community organizer to a building superintendent—to pay his way. But his real payment comes in the form of stories that people tell him. When he crosses paths with Sam, a carnival operator and consummate showman, he begins to nurture his own knack for storytelling. Suddenly, the yarns he spins help him find his way into the good graces of those he meets during his travels. He learns to adapt his own experiences and those of others into larger-than-life legends, and before long, he’s selling out venues as a bona fide American hero—a Daniel Boone, of sorts. Throughout, Landfair’s evocative prose places the reader on the seemingly endless highways and byways of our expansive country (“Cars sped past on either side—blurs of headlights and turn signals”). However, for all of its focus on trying to understand the American spirit, the novel fails to divulge very much information about its main character. Readers know that he’s on a quest, but it remains unclear what his real motivations are. Although readers spend a lot of time with him, they’re always riding shotgun, never really getting a peek below the surface. Intriguingly, the story’s trajectory is eastward, reversing the usual trend for this type of road story, but in the end, its resolution is no surprise.
An uneven road-trip tale that attempts to take readers straight to the heart of America.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940500355
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Harbinger Book Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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