by Joanna Smith Rakoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2009
Such plot strands (there are plenty more) initially defy credulity, but as the novel progresses, it’s a bigger surprise when...
Sometimes a novel’s surface weaknesses reveal themselves as underlying strengths. Such is the case with A Fortunate Age, the debut by Joanna Smith Rakoff. The novel initially seems derivative, contrived and cliched. But ultimately it is brilliantly so, subverting all that has inspired it.
In her acknowledgments, the author reserves final credit for, “of course, Mary McCarthy, to whose marvelous novel, The Group, my own is, of course, an homage.” The template of following a group of friends through the travails of early adulthood will forever be associated with McCarthy, but Claire Messud more recently employed the model to greater literary effect with The Emperor’s Children. A similar dynamic has propelled the film The Big Chill and the TV series Friends. Among the conventions of such rites-of-passage narratives are that some of the friends will succeed beyond expectation, some will fall short of their promise and others will couple improbably. Life will not turn out as they’d planned. In Rakoff’s novel, the six friends have moved from Ohio’s Oberlin (where the author attended college) to New York—mainly hipster Brooklyn. The narrative begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. In between, it chronicles six years that are filled with such belief-straining coincidence, startling leaps between cause and effect and shallowness of character that it initially seems that the novelist doesn’t know what she’s doing. Until it becomes obvious that she knows exactly what she’s doing—skewering both the soap-opera conventions of such a narrative and the values of the generation that spawned this one. Clueless offspring of self-righteous boomer parents, these post-slackers stumble into marriage as heedlessly as some drunks stumble into bed. One has fallen in love with an actor buddy from college, until she has a chance encounter with an FBI agent, who loses her when she is impregnated by a hotshot magazine editor turned film director. Another is a promising actress replaced by a bigger name when the production moves to Broadway. She subsequently falls for a married indie-rock singer, moonlights as a bartender so she can make money to care for her previously institutionalized sister, is pursued by a psychiatrist who insists the sister needs further treatment—and then marries the psychiatrist and becomes a doctor herself.
Such plot strands (there are plenty more) initially defy credulity, but as the novel progresses, it’s a bigger surprise when chance encounters don’t lead to life-changing relationships, as if the plot were a literary pinball machine with characters bouncing off each other randomly. Still not sure what they want to be when they grow up, they are well-schooled in the hippest indie labels, the trendiest Brooklyn blocks and the hottest spots to meet for cappuccino, but they have absolutely no idea how to navigate love, marriage and jobs, which they both deride and desire as “a normal life.” Here’s hoping for a sequel, when all of them will be older, and none will be wiser.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9077-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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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
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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