An offbeat, honest take on romance that offers cringes and laughs in equal supply.
Warrington tells the story of a memorably mismatched couple in her debut novel.
Clifford is 54, newly divorced and stretched beyond his financial means. He has a body that’s failing him and an elderly mother who insists that he murdered his infant brother more than 40 years ago. Meanwhile, Gina has two children from her abusive first marriage and a third from an affair, as well as plenty of regrets, a dearth of confidence, and a desire to find love again. When the two meet online, they find an immediate affinity—although perhaps it’s a warning sign that Gina is attracted to Clifford’s frank negativity. At first, it seems as if the two may form a perfect partnership, as they commiserate over how life seems to delight in tormenting people. But when the chaos of their respective lives begins to butt in, their personal flaws make for a difficult love affair. They must decide whether a relationship is actually possible and, if so, if it’s really worth the effort. Clifford is delightfully repugnant: selfish, reactionary, angry, and self-pitying. He’s an addition to the pantheon of somehow-lovable, angry, middle-aged British men in literature. Gina is more sympathetic, yet she possesses her own rich collection of shortcomings that make her a vigorous character. The couple’s vitality gives the novel a human center, which makes the plot feel effortless and organic. Warrington’s prose is as sharp and unadorned as her characters, and it’s laden with the wry cynicism of someone who isn’t interested in peddling romantic fantasies. Much of the book’s humor comes from the delight it takes in humbling its characters (“His body was a bendy metal coathanger performing a very poor job of supporting his weighty clothing”). Although the ending isn’t a complete surprise, there’s still something quite satisfying in it. Overall, this is the story of a modern, dysfunctional, second-chance sort of love—the kind that people don’t necessarily expect or desire. It may, however, be just the sort of love that has the most to teach people about dignity, charity, compassion, and trust.
An offbeat, honest take on romance that offers cringes and laughs in equal supply.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502778901
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...
A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.
Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.
Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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