Pressing parallels to Greek drama, this Indian author’s ambitious but poorly structured third novel is about an Afghanistan War episode.
The setting is a U.S. combat outpost in Kandahar province, a Taliban stronghold. The guys are spooked. An ambush in the surrounding mountains has claimed two of them. That was followed by an insurgent attack during a blinding sandstorm, leaving four Americans dead and four wounded. The Afghan National Army soldiers abandoned their positions. The next day, a strange apparition approaches the base perimeter. It’s covered in a burqa and is pushing a cart. Man or woman? Suicide bomber or decoy? There’s no suspense for the reader, for the apparition, a young woman called Nizam, has already introduced herself in the opening section. Her family, returning from a wedding party, was killed by a U.S. bomb, leaving herself and her brother Yusuf, who led the revenge attack on the base. Yusuf was not a Talib but an anti-American freedom fighter. The wounded Nizam, her legs reduced to stumps, has come to bury him. The American captain, awaiting orders from battalion headquarters, refuses to release the body. So there’s a standoff. But when the soldiers hear Nizam playing her lute, they are spellbound: She has won their hearts and minds but not the captain’s, and her mission will end tragically. There’s material here for a novella but not more. The author inflates it in various ways, including stateside flashbacks. Long quotations from Sophocles’ Antigone, in which a burial is key, bookend his story. One lieutenant, Frobenius, is a classicist who has enlisted for old-fashioned reasons of honor, and his journal is laced with classical allusions. He sees the Pashtuns, with their concepts of honor and shame, as descendants of the Greeks. There is much desultory chatter among the grunts, ethnically diverse in the old war-story tradition, but little action, apart from that early firefight.
Nizam’s mission exposes the contradictions in the American presence in Afghanistan; the Greek connection is hardly necessary.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95589-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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