Duberstein (The Alibi Breakfast, 1995; Postcards from Pinsk, 1991, etc.) sets out to fictionalize the last half of Herman Melville’s life—but in spite of a poetic and historically flawless effort, the result remains often turgid. After Moby Dick in 1851, Melville’s reading public fell away, and for over three decades he effectively wrote little or nothing. Duberstein opens his own tale when the novel of the great white whale is being published—and the Melville family is living a life of bucolic work and pleasure in rural Berkshire, Massachusetts, where the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne also reside in the neighborhood. All is edenic, that is, except that Melville (“the man who lived with cannibals”) is sadly unimpassioned within his marriage—with the result that this robust farmer/sailor/writer has an affair with the life-loving Mrs. Sarah Morewood right about the time his own third child is being born. Break-up between the lovers is inevitable, and the end of the affair is the beginning of 30 years of emptiness for Melville, filled only by his own determined stoicism as a Manhattan family dweller, the machine-like regularity of his ways, and his unglamourous job as a customs inspector. With age, however, comes a shape to things, and 30 years after his love for the now dead Sarah, another woman with Sarah’s verve and love of life enters Melville’s life—with results that will be no less sorrowful, and a narrative longueur that will be no less trying for the reader. The novel bursts at the seams with period flavor—the Sixth Avenue el has velour seats, Staten Island fine oysters, East 76th Street is a rough and uncouth neighborhood—but the stubborn, stony, often wordy Melville himself remains inert, however passionate inwardly, as life grows more confined, children and lovers die (one son is a suicide), passion is unattainable, the literary life unachievable. A fictional biography from the 19th century that’s extraordinary in its details, yet uncompelling at its center.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57962-007-8
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
A warmhearted and highly entertaining first novel in which a poor but plucky Kentucky gift with a sharp tongue, soft heart and strong spirit sets out on a cross-country trip and arrives at surprising new meanings for love, friendship, and family—as well as overcoming the big and little fears that inhibit lives. Taylor Greer has always been afraid of two things: tires, one of which she saw explode and cripple a local tobacco farmer; and pregnancy, the common, constricting fate of her own mother and, generally, of young girls in Pittman County, KY, where she has grown up. To avoid the latter, Taylor, born Marietta, sets out on a set of the former to find a new life in the West. What she doesn't count on, however, is her flighty '55 Volkswagon temporarily "giving out" in the Oklahoma flatlands or the ditching of a dumbstruck Indian baby in the car while she has it fixed. By the time Taylor's car breaks down again, and finally, in Tucson, Taylor has figured out that the baby has been badly abused, but not how to support it or herself, or how to lure the baby back into trust, growth, and speech. So—she takes a job in a dreaded tire-repair shop from which her car refuses to budge, and meets a motley collection of sanctuary workers, refugees, other ex-Kentuckians, social workers, and spinsters who, together, help her to bolster her courage and create a real family for her sweet, stunned, unbidden child. A lovely, funny, touching and humane debut, reminiscent of the work of Hilma Wolitzer and Francine Prose.
Pub Date: March 16, 1987
ISBN: 0060915544
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
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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