Veteran Godwin’s latest (Grief Cottage, 2017, etc.) tracks a half-century friendship between two very different yet oddly compatible women.
The dean and dorm mistress of Lovegood College pair Feron Hood and Merry Jellicoe as roommates in 1958, hoping that sunny, outgoing Merry will be a steadying influence on Feron, who has recently lost her alcoholic mother and fled from an abusive stepfather. The girls do indeed form a lasting bond even though Merry leaves after a single semester to run the family tobacco farm when her parents are killed in a plane crash. They have both taken their first steps as writers under the guidance of Literature and Composition teacher Maud Petrie, and during their mostly long-distance relationship, Feron will be goaded to write three novels by Merry’s occasional magazine publications; she is at work on a fourth about their friendship as the book closes. The two women rarely meet in person, and Feron is bad about answering letters, but we see that they remain important in each other’s thoughts. Godwin unfolds their stories in a meditative, elliptical fashion, circling back to reveal defining moments that include tragic losses, unexpected love, and nurturing friendships. Self-contained, uncommunicative Feron seems the more withholding character, but Merry voices one of the novel’s key insights: “Everyone has secrets no one else should know” while Feron reveals essential truths about her life in her novels. Maud Petrie and Lovegood dean Susan Fox, each of whom has secrets of her own, continue as strong presences for Feron and Merry, who have been shaped by Lovegood more enduringly than they might have anticipated. Feron’s courtly Uncle Rowan and blunt Aunt Mabel, Merry’s quirky brother Ritchie, devoted manager Mr. Jack, and a suave Navy veteran with intimate links to both women are among the many nuanced characters drawn by Godwin with their human contradictions and complexities on full display. A closing letter from Dean Fox movingly reiterates the novel’s conjoined themes of continuity and change.
Intelligent, reflective, satisfying fiction from an old master.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63286-822-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
Did you like this book?
PERSPECTIVES
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
Did you like this book?
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
GET 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/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
