Griffin’s portrait of an Irish octogenarian provides a stage for the exploration of guilt, regret, and loss, all in the...
What becomes of the brokenhearted? That question, asked—and answered equivocally—in the Motown classic, receives a more thorough treatment in Griffin’s debut novel.
Maurice Hannigan, Irish octogenarian and curmudgeon, plans a memorable night at a hotel bar in his native County Meath. As the night wears on, Maurice raises a narrative toast to each of five characters—family members all—to be followed by a solitary stay in the honeymoon suite. As Maurice’s sentimental (yet cleareyed) trip down Memory Lane unfolds, his stories recount early difficulties at a rural school as well as later-in-life successes in the business world. Each stage of his life is illustrated with a tale about one of the five, all now deceased but for a devoted, yet distant, son. The lingering presence of Maurice’s dear departed in his daily life is considerable, but it is the paradoxical absence created by the death of his wife, Sadie, that Maurice cannot adapt to and which propels his night of elegiac remembrances and his plans for thereafter. Small-town rivalries and the lasting repercussions of Maurice’s childhood pocketing of a valuable gold coin recur throughout the five accounts. His soliloquies about these themes and surrounding events lend the novel a playlike structure and feel. (If Milo O’Shea were still available, the most difficult casting decision could easily be made.) Some supporting characters in Maurice’s life are more vividly drawn than others, and his storytelling tends toward the meandering, but, in his defense, the tone never wavers over the course of five fine whisky-and-stout toasts, a credit to the steady thread of melancholy woven throughout.
Griffin’s portrait of an Irish octogenarian provides a stage for the exploration of guilt, regret, and loss, all in the course of one memorable night.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20058-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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