An Everyman turns to dealing drugs—and pitches headlong downward.
Tommie Simms is desperate. Laid off from his job at Global Mutual IndemCorp, he’s torn from the sanctuary of his 83rd-floor office and returned to the Four Corners, a Chicago neighborhood where “they’ve got as many cardboard box-tops covering window holes as they’ve got glass.” Ojikutu (47th Street Black, 2003) renders the desperation palpable—of Tommie’s mother, on Step Five of her 12-step program, sick with worry; Tommie’s wife, Tarsha; and baby girl a stone’s throw from homelessness. A former golden boy who’d made it out of the ghetto to Southern Illinois University, Tommie can’t bear his defaulted credit cards and his family’s disappointment. His cousin, Remi, offers a way out: nickel bags of pot to sell. Tarsha turns a blind eye, and for a while, Tommie prospers, as feelings of guilt gnaw at his soul. He’s crossed over, after all—from the dream of suit-and-tie deliverance to a hard-knock nightmare, where hustlers parade the avenue oozing menace. Will he become, then, his own shadow-self? Officer Weidman has his eye on him, itching to bring down the upstart, too well-spoken for the Corners, too confident, uppity. Sure enough, Tommie gets busted—and a teasing, violent mano-a-mano begins between the fallen angel and the vengeful, devilish cop. Ojikutu’s story is tough and assured. What truly dazzles, though, is the language, a cross between James Baldwin’s soulful song and the nightmare poetry of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The author’s voice is especially riveting when discussing loss and Tommie’s “mother who left me pinned to the window glass, watching trains and folks running in vain and waiting for some sign to point out love’s return.”
Gritty, lyrical, intense.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8289-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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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/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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