by Molly McCloskey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 20, 2018
Elegant prose and nuanced self-awareness, reminiscent of early Edna O'Brien, enhance this intensely focused story of memory...
McCloskey burrows inside the ruminations of a middle-aged American woman returning to Ireland, where she lived as a young woman, to confront memories of her failed marriage.
Raised in Oregon by her loving single mother, Alice first came to Ireland on an adventurous whim in the late 1980s when she was 24 but left after her divorce. Years later, she is working for an Irish NGO in Kenya when her mother dies. At emotional loose ends, she returns to Ireland. Ostensibly there to write a report on her refugee work, unsure how long she’ll stay, Alice begins sorting through memories of her earlier time in Ireland: working at a pub in Sligo and hanging out with a bohemian crowd before meeting and falling in love with furniture importer Eddie, a gentle, solid man of few words. Alice, who barely knew her father, was drawn to the cocoon of safety and love Eddie provided despite her “flashes of doubt” about his verbal reticence. Once married, Alice found herself veering between loving contentment and emotional claustrophobia, resenting yet seduced by the “ready-made role” of conventional wife. She worked half-heartedly as a journalist while the couple’s social life revolved around Eddie’s friends and family. Then she fell into a mindlessly passionate affair with Cauley, a writer with a burgeoning career. The story of the affair and its impact on Alice’s marriage offers few surprises, but McCloskey excels in weaving Alice’s twin griefs over her lost marriage—Eddie has remarried and become a father—and her mother’s death into her present life as a solitary woman willing to accept the choices she has made. Despite the importance of the men in Alice’s life, the novel’s heart lies with Alice’s mother, a woman who loved her daughter fiercely, married for the first time in her 50s, and found a happiness that has so far eluded Alice.
Elegant prose and nuanced self-awareness, reminiscent of early Edna O'Brien, enhance this intensely focused story of memory and self-imposed loss.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7246-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
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by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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