by Joyce Carol Oates ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1984
In her early fiction, Oates often displayed a sharp talent for the texture and rhythm of psychological obsession—but this study of the feverish friendship between two women is unconvincing, thin and artificial, from start to finish. The novel is presented from the viewpoint of Monica Jensen, a 30-ish, fair, rather repressed sort who takes a teaching job at a private boys' school in rural Pennsylvania—largely in order to recover from her recent bad-marriage, which has left physical scars (an abortion, a small facial scar from a fight) as well as emotional ones. But soon Monica meets her temperamental opposite: dark, artistic, sensual, hedonistic Sheila Trask, 42—a semi-famous painter, widow of a famous sculptor, a local landowner. And immediately Monica feels,"the tug of a powerful attraction," elated when Sheila seems to take an interest in her: "Monica knew secretly that her capacity for love—for love and what is meant by 'passion'—was deficient set beside Sheila Trask's". . . while Sheila seems equally awed by Monica's good-natured, competent, "blond optimism." The women begin talking together regularly; Monica dotes on Sheila's visits, gawks over Sheila's artistic talent; she even tags along when Sheila dons working-class disguise to engage in bar-and-grill flirtations with truckers. (The novel catches fire briefly here.) The friendship quickly sours, however—as the other side of Sheila's artistic soul emerges: combative, insecure, alcoholic, suicidal. Monica breaks away, reenters the safe, superficial world she lived in before. But something is missing—and when a needy Sheila makes a bid to rekindle the relationship, Monica eagerly agrees, but on new terms. "Now she would be cautious—she would be in control," as Monica becomes Sheila's indispensable confidant/helpmeet and the friendship edges toward open eroticism. . . but then plunges Monica into a nightmare of rape, illness, and self-exposure. Neither of the women here is credibly drawn; nor are they persuasive as polar "types." And Oates' prose belabors each point repetitiously—making this often read like a heavily padded short story. Mildly intriguing at the start, then increasingly murky and tiresome.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1984
ISBN: 0865381003
Page Count: 223
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1984
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by Joyce Carol Oates ; edited by Greg Johnson
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edited by Joyce Carol Oates
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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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by Sally Rooney
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by Sally Rooney
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