A solitary art historian reflects on the men and women he’s loved in McKenzie’s melancholy debut novel.
Forty-two-year-old Alan Orr walks the streets of Florence, Italy, immersed in the beauty of the city and nostalgia for his youth. His reminiscences mostly focus on Martin, an affectionate friend from his boarding school days, and Lauren, a married woman with whom Alan had an affair as part of her open marriage in the late 1970s. The nostalgia is sweet and somber, set against Florence’s enchanting piazzas, and the novel is full of Alan’s vivid observations, whether he’s describing a sexual encounter with Luca, a young prostitute, or eavesdropping on tourists’ conversations in a hotel lobby. After he returns home to San Francisco, he dines with his friend Matt, a composer who lives a solitary, work-focused life, not unlike Alan’s. Eventually, Matt introduces Alan to Nick, a younger man he’s fond of, and Alan comes to develop a liking for him as well. Alan fills his days with writing and walks and often exchanges affection and pleasantries with the male dancers at the Polk Street Theatre, who provide Alan “a holiday from himself.” Yet not even these intimacies can rescue Alan from a descent into depression, as his walks grow longer and his mind grows more unfocused. The novel sags when Alan goes into therapy, which allows for navel-gazing and elaboration of his back story, which includes an abusive father and a mother with a pill habit. In order to shake things up, Alan invites Nick on a return trip to Florence, only to find out that the company he most enjoys is his own. As time wears on, he gets the opportunity to reunite with both Martin and Lauren, leading to lifelike, if anticlimactic, closure. The narration slips between past and present events, which may sometimes leave readers lost. However, its poetic turns of phrase elevate Alan’s story from a morass of depression to an evocative stroll through the nostalgia of middle age. Florence, for example, is described as “a large, heady display of the human soul.” McKenzie expertly draws the secondary characters that Alan meets along the way, and their charisma and energy serve to balance Alan’s pensive moods. The settings are characters in themselves, and the colorful neighborhoods and streets of Florence, San Francisco and Boston help anchor Alan’s introspective story in strong senses of place.
A carefully crafted meditation on disappointment that includes many scenes of beauty worth savoring.
Pub Date: May 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495444449
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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