A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.
This plaintive sixth novel from the Booker-nominated Irish author (Mothers and Sons, 2008, etc.) is both akin to his earlier fiction and a somewhat surprising hybrid.
Tóibín’s treatment of the early adulthood of Eilis Lacey, a quiet girl from the town of Enniscorthy who accepts a kindly priest’s sponsorship to work and live in America, is characterized by a scrupulously precise domestic realism reminiscent of the sentimental bestsellers of Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber and Betty Smith (in her beloved A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). But as Eilis both falters and matures abroad, something more interesting takes shape. Tóibín fashions a compelling characterization of a woman caught between two worlds, unsure almost until the novel’s final page where her obligations and affections truly reside. Several deft episodes and set pieces bring Eilis to convincing life: her timid acts of submission, while still living at home, to her extroverted, vibrant older sister Rose; the ordeal of third-class passenger status aboard ship (surely seasickness has never been presented more graphically); her second-class status among postwar Brooklyn’s roiling motley populace, and at the women’s boarding house where she’s virtually a non-person; and the exuberant liberation sparked by her romance with handsome plumber Tony Fiorello, whose colorful family contrasts brashly with Eilis’s own dour and scattered one. Tóibín is adept at suggestive understatement, best displayed in lucid portrayals of cultural interaction and conflict in a fledgling America still defining itself; and notably in a beautiful account of Eilis’s first sexual experience with Tony (whom she’ll soon wed), revealed as the act of a girl who knows she must fully become a woman in order to shoulder the burdens descending on her. And descend they do, as a grievous family loss reshapes Eilis’s future (literally) again and again.
A fine and touching novel, persuasive proof of Tóibín’s ever-increasing skills and range.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3831-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A compelling portrait of women not lost but thriving against the odds.
It's been 14 years since the Great War ended, and Violet Speedwell is still grieving the loss of her brother and her fiance. A daring move—living on her own—will bring her a chance to breathe and love again.
Of course, life as an independent woman in 1932 is hard. A typist for Southern Counties Insurance, Violet barely makes enough money to cover her rent at Mrs. Harvey's boardinghouse. Budgeting for one hot dinner a week and subsisting on margarine and Marmite sandwiches leaves Violet practically starving. She's emotionally starving, too. Chevalier (New Boy, 2017, etc.) masterfully portrays the bleak lives of the “surplus women” left to carry on after a generation of young men—their potential husbands—were killed in World War I. Telling the tale of the Lost Generation from a woman's perspective, Chevalier fills in the outlines of these forgotten women with unending penny-pinching, mended dresses, and lonely evenings with tea and a Trollope novel. Yet a chance glimpse into a special service at her church opens the door to Violet’s healing: She finds the broderers, a group of women embroidering gorgeous, colorful seats and kneelers for the church. Led by the vibrant Louisa Pesel (and her dour assistant, Mrs. Biggins), the broderers' guild offers Violet a chance to make something beautiful and lasting in a world that has been dark and has cut off life at its knees for too long. In Chevalier’s novel, the embroidery circle becomes a metaphorical tapestry, threading all these women together. Soon Violet has not only joined the circle, but also made unexpected friends. Violet also discovers her own courage to try for love, a love her society would condemn, but in these days and in this author’s hands, all love is sacred.
A compelling portrait of women not lost but thriving against the odds.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55824-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
The inventiveness of Mantel’s language is the chief draw here; the plot, as such, will engage only the most determined of...
Second in Mantel’s trilogy charting the Machiavellian trajectory of Thomas Cromwell.
The Booker award-winning first volume, Wolf Hall (2009), ended before the titular residence, that of Jane Seymour’s family, figured significantly in the life of King Henry VIII. Seeing through Cromwell’s eyes, a point of view she has thoroughly assimilated, Mantel approaches the major events slantwise, as Cromwell, charged with the practical details of managing Henry’s political and religious agendas, might have. We rejoin the characters as the king’s thousand-day marriage to Anne Boleyn is well along. Princess Elizabeth is a toddler, the exiled Queen Katherine is dying, and Henry’s disinherited daughter Princess Mary is under house arrest. As Master Secretary, Cromwell, while managing his own growing fortune, is always on call to put out fires at the court of the mercurial Henry (who, even for a king, is the ultimate Bad Boss). The English people, not to mention much of Europe, have never accepted Henry’s second marriage as valid, and Anne’s upstart relatives are annoying some of Britain’s more entrenched nobility with their arrogance and preening. Anne has failed to produce a son, and despite Cromwell’s efforts to warn her (the two were once allies of a sort), she refuses to alter her flamboyant behavior, even as Henry is increasingly beguiled by Jane Seymour’s contrasting (some would say calculated) modesty. Cromwell, a key player in the annulment of Henry’s first marriage, must now find a pretext for the dismantling of a second. Once he begins interrogating, with threats of torture, Anne’s male retainers to gather evidence of her adulteries, Mantel has a difficult challenge in keeping up our sympathy for Cromwell. She succeeds, mostly by portraying Cromwell as acutely aware that one misstep could land “him, Cromwell” on the scaffold as well. That misstep will happen, but not in this book.
The inventiveness of Mantel’s language is the chief draw here; the plot, as such, will engage only the most determined of Tudor enthusiasts.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9003-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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