Gardner's belief in the primacy of tale-telling (see Moral Fiction) is so firm that he doesn't mind telling us that this tale isn't exactly his own: "A key event in Freddy's Book (King Gustav and the Devil) is drawn from a tale in Mark Helprin's collection, A Dove of the East and Other Stories," explains the prefatory note. And "numerous passages here are drawn, slightly altered, from other sources." Well, what's here may not be original, yet it is nonetheless, for all the expropriating, very much Gardner—disingenuous, didactic, well-worded but flat. A specialist in psycho-history named Winesap comes to lecture at the university in Madison, Wisconsin, and while there is apprehended and invited to dinner by a spooky old Scandinavianist, Professor Agaard, who wants Winesap to meet his son Freddy—who, Agaard calmly says, is "a monster." And so Freddy is, as Winesap discovers when, on a snowy night, he makes it to the house to meet him: twelve years old, "big as a rhinoceros, a small elephant" with eyes "red-rimmed, huge behind gold-rimmed glasses. . . childish pink lips" (a wonderful description and perhaps a Gardner self-portrait). Freddy lives pent up in a too-small room, reading books, writing them too, and Winesap (along with the hapless reader) gets to sample one of these Freddy-authored books: "King Gustav and the Devil," a heavy-going allegory about Lars-Goren Bergquist, an eight-foot-tall knight in 16th-century Sweden, who helps his cousin Gustav Vasa to assume the throne and then goes out on quest to destroy the Devil. The St. George-and-the-Dragon motif here is not hidden, and the road is bricked with all of Gardner's by now familiar pet peeves: organized religion, writers like William Gass ("He concentrated on the idea of Bishop Brask, cut off from heaven by boredom and despair, a man who no longer had feeling for anything except, perhaps, style"), philosophical relativism, and literature's city slickers: "Great cities rise, artists grow wealthy, their vision grows confused and complex. What a pity! Irony comes in. Paradox. Soon the only powerful emotions artists feel is nihilism." One would have hoped that Gardner had gotten his preaching and feuding out of his system with Moral Fiction—not so, alas. Here his lumbering counterattacks and homilies pummel away whatever surface charms the story has, making this a stiff little diversion (illustrated by Daniel Biamonte) of interest mainly to tireless observers of book-world bickering.
Pub Date: March 1, 1980
ISBN: 1893996840
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1980
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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