Trite, but Keyes’ lively wit makes it go down easily.
Latest doggedly life-affirming romance from the prolific Irish bestseller (This Charming Man, 2008, etc.), this one set in a Dublin apartment house.
A narrating “spirit” floats among the flats desperate to make sure that at least one romance among the tenants succeeds. Music publicist Katie is frustrated in her relationship with workaholic/chocoholic Conall, a genuine charmer even though he earns his fortune downsizing corporations. Lydia, a tough cookie of a cab driver, keeps falling into sex with her Polish flatmate, even though they hate each other. Octogenarian Jemima, who has psychic powers, is thrilled when her blazingly handsome foster son, small-town gardener Fionn, comes to stay while filming a TV series. Soon Katie has dumped Conall and taken up with Fionn, who has become a local star, while Conall has become Lydia’s unlikely boyfriend. As their comic banter flies, a darker, more poignant plot line follows Matt and Maeve, a young married couple troubled by a secret that threatens their genuine devotion. Thanks to the sporadically all-knowing spirit, readers gradually learn the tenants’ back stories, from Lydia’s struggle to care for her increasingly demented mother to the violence perpetuated against Maeve by her former boyfriend, a political activist who gets his just reward in an act of supernatural vengeance. (It’s interesting, albeit disquieting, that Keyes’ one true villain is a leftist do-gooder, her ultimate hero a corporate downsizer.) The author endows her characters with small idiosyncrasies and imperfections that make them seem more fully developed than they actually are. The narrative is strictly formula: comedy, pathos and shallow spiritual uplift mixed with food and fashion. As partners mix and match, who will end up with whom is never truly in doubt, and the leisurely buildup climaxes in a strained ending with crises and happy resolutions rushing by.
Trite, but Keyes’ lively wit makes it go down easily.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02140-6
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In Tyler's latest testing of the strangulating tugs and miraculous stretch of familial and marital ties, a middle-aged Baltimore couple (inexplicably linked, like so many of Tyler's lovers) take a one-day's detour-clogged trip to a funeral. It's a circuit of comic bumps and heartbreaking plunges that takes them home again to dwindling hope and options, but also to the certainty of love. Maggie Moran, 48, a nursing-home aide (although years ago, her purse-lipped mother had demanded college), was certainly a "klutz." Everyone, including Maggie's "closed-in, isolate" husband Ira, thought so. Maggie had a "knobby, fumbling way of progressing through life" feeling "as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus. . .and if she made the smallest adjustment everything would settle perfectly into place." Maggie had indeed "adjusted" the focus of young Fiona, pregnant by Maggie and Ira's failure-bound son Jesse, at the very door of the abortion clinic (surrounded by amateur picketers). Through some hardworking, warmhearted lying, Maggie had forged Jesse and Fiona's marriage; and Maggie's "breathing lessons," coaching Fiona in pregnancy, had as much control over her granddaughter's birth as all Maggie's efforts to prevent the break-up of a young marriage with no connective tissue. Now Maggie is bent on retrieving Fiona and granddaughter back to Jesse—another Moran who's "thrown away his future," like Ira, who had dreams of being a doctor, but was hobbled by his own family, whom he loved and hated. (Could it be, however, in the words of a splintery geezer, netted by Maggie on the highway, that "what you throw away is all that really counts"?) Before the visit to Fiona, there's the funeral, and middle-aged classmates watch silent movies of their young selves. The camera had recorded Maggie and Ira as "ordinary"—in the way a sea shell marks genus but not the undulations of existence. Once home, Maggie's carousel of hopes stops, and she cries out: "What are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?" But Ira, wiser, shrewder, offers and welcomes love. A seriocomic journey in which, as always, underlying the character-rooted, richly comic turns, is Tyler's affectionate empathy for those who detour—and "practice life" to "get it right.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1988
ISBN: 0345485572
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
Deep and deeply funny.
A surreal love story about the courtship between a living woman and a dead man.
Rachel is a dark-haired, red-lipped reference librarian living in Brooklyn for whom romance, so far, has been a general disappointment. “I have fallen in love with my own daydreams,” she explains, “and then they have gone out into the world and returned to me embodied as men.” But the men disappoint, in the end. “It was not that the men themselves were realer than the daydream,” she says, but rather that the men were too weak to “withstand the daydream’s reality.” And then, at the bus stop, she sees Thomas and becomes fascinated by this electric, sad-seeming man. He notices her, too, drawn to her perpetual air of alert discomfort, “like a squirrel, or some other kind of nervous prey,” and one Saturday, she follows him onto his bus instead of her own and their courtship begins. (“Men like to believe that they initiate things, but often they only initiate when the fruit is very low-hanging,” she observes, in one of the book’s many delightfully blunt and correct observations.) The problem, of course, is that Thomas is dead. But because of an “institutional error”—the institution being death—he is “insufficiently dead” and so must be temporarily “re-manifested,” returned to a body that “exactly resembles” his own until “the Office” is able to “complete the procedures necessary to process” his arrival. They have issued a set of instructions designed to help him navigate this new phase of his not-quite-existence, all designed to prevent him from incurring regrets. “Sexual contact” is not advised in this state; it is “the most efficient way to incur regrets.” And also, his body is beginning to dissolve. It is a plot that could be—that should be—unbearably twee, oppressively quirky, in love with its own melancholy. Instead, Bonnaffons’ (The Wrong Heaven, 2018) first full-length novel is a rare pleasure: a philosophical rom-com too weird, too bodily, too precise, too fun to get bogged down in trembling sentiment.
Deep and deeply funny.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-51616-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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