With a ferocious and probing style, Kennedy examines love and pain and the whole damn thing.
On an ocean liner during a trans-Atlantic voyage, emotions are intensified as love relationships get tossed about.
Elizabeth and Derek are a couple—sort of. At least they’re sharing a cabin onboard the ship. They’re almost engaged, but not quite, and Elizabeth is looking for reasons to escape from the relationship. Derek is a con artist, a profession that doesn’t carry well into romance. Onboard, they meet Arthur Lockwood, yet another con artist, and although Elizabeth pretends to be meeting Arthur for the first time, it turns out they’d been lovers years before, and she wants to hide this fact from Derek. This is easily done, for Derek becomes devastatingly seasick and for days is immobilized in their cabin. Elizabeth gradually, and at first reluctantly, enters into the force field that is Arthur, a charming older man still very much taken with Elizabeth. Despite her initial reticence, she gradually begins to spend more time with Arthur, and eventually, they rekindle their affair. Kennedy becomes lyrically erotic when she gets these two back together. In the interstices, Elizabeth and Arthur and Derek meet other passengers on the voyage, most notably Bunny and Francis, the latter of who is pleased to see Elizabeth turning away from Derek. As Francis explains, “I do get tired of seeing fantastic women with appalling men. It’s like some form of blood sacrifice, self-harm”—not that Elizabeth needs too much nudging. Kennedy occasionally takes us away from the claustral atmosphere of the ship to fill in the gaps in Elizabeth’s previous life.
With a ferocious and probing style, Kennedy examines love and pain and the whole damn thing.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02770-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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