Despite its flaws, an engrossing novel about a dysfunctional family, well suited for the beach.
A matriarch’s 75th birthday in 1985 sparks a family reunion, and the up-rooting of a few long-buried secrets.
This debut novel offers a reversal-of-fortune saga about a family from Philadelphia’s Main Line —an enclave of the city’s suburbs defined by old wealth and extravagant mansions. As the story opens, Dolly Scott has just been arrested in the middle of the night for trespassing on the grounds of the Hilltop Country Club, caught apparently trying to dig up a box of jewelry she had buried on the property decades earlier when it was still part of her grand estate, known as Llantrisant. Dolly, whose money was stolen by her husband, Dixon, before he ran off with his mistress, now lives in the former gatehouse of that estate. Meanwhile, the youngest of the three Scott offspring has been locked up in the pricy West Lawn mental sanitarium. The tale moves back and forth between 1985 and the 1950s (the decade during which the Scott family’s dysfunction gradually culminates in its ultimate downfall). Rhea writes the 1985 sections in the first-person voice of Dolly’s older daughter Hillary Scott Sherman, while the tales from the ’50s, which make up the great bulk of the narrative, are delivered in the third-person. The technique almost works, but with Hillary remaining the central protagonist, there is initially a discordant feel to the switch in voice, especially because she is the one who leads the reader into the retrospective by saying: “I slipped into a reverie about the old days. I guess you could say…the start of it all, was the day my brother [Trip] found our younger sister, Penny, locked in the tennis court.” But emerging from that point on is an engaging, well-delivered story that includes parental neglect, shattered egos, love, death, betrayal, and emotional fragility. Along the way, readers are treated to a blistering behind-the-scenes portrait of the lifestyles of Philadelphia’s socially elite. A concluding chapter, “Wrap-up,” is unsatisfyingly brief, but it does offer a surprise final twist. Unfortunately, it also leaves a couple of recurring questions about Dixon’s past unanswered.
Despite its flaws, an engrossing novel about a dysfunctional family, well suited for the beach.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5174-1538-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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