A thoroughly confused tale whose inarticulate protagonist is the biggest, but by no means the only, source of frustration.
Young lovers fall victim to the machinations of the middle-aged in this limp first novel from South African poet Schwartzman.
On a Monday morning in 1993, the hilly Ghanaian tourist resort of Aburi is in an uproar. One of the town’s most prominent citizens, upscale restaurant owner Nana Aforiwaa, has drowned in the river; her close friend John, headmaster of the local boarding school, is raving and in shock. Nana had been searching for her 16-year-old niece Celeste, gone missing with boyfriend Kwasi, a protégé of John. Nana, who raised Celeste, had with John’s approval encouraged the friendship between their young charges, turning a blind eye to the teenagers’ carrying-on in public. Was Nana a benevolent free spirit, or a lonely meddler with an unhealthy obsession? That’s one of many questions that goes unanswered here. Kwasi becomes the target for the townspeople’s indignation. He moves to Accra to live with his kindly uncle Festus, and puts his painting talents to good use as a signwriter. Celeste joins him. Their love is still intense, but shadowed by guilt over Nana’s death. Shy and awkward, Kwasi can only express himself through his painting. Eventually he bolts, joining the West African diaspora in Paris. Nana’s drowning was no accident, we learn; for the sake of Kwasi and Celeste, John had pushed her under. This does not ring true, and the revelation is handled clumsily. John comes clean to the town doctor, who passes the news on to Festus, who relays the confession to Kwasi in Paris at the very end. So Nana’s murder, which wrecked three lives, is sidelined for much of the narrative. The only flickers of excitement are provided by Schwartzman’s account of “the flesh machine,” the series of handlers who move Kwasi from Accra through Senegal to Paris.
A thoroughly confused tale whose inarticulate protagonist is the biggest, but by no means the only, source of frustration.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37873-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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