An engaging tale with an earnest hero but a permeating melancholy leaves a lingering sense of disquietude.
In this novel by an author acclaimed for his Midwestern-themed short stories, a young man struggles to find his path to a meaningful future.
Readers meet 27-year-old Tom Johnson as he sits in a pub waiting for his classmates to return from a first-semester law final; he has arrived early because he walked out of the exam without completing it. This is not the first thing he hasn’t finished. There was a stint as a member of a band, Self Portrait, down in Buenos Aires, but it never attained the envisioned success: “On paper, our music was revolutionary. The theory was better than the sound; it was better appreciated with the brain than with the ear.” He returned to his hometown, Duluth, Minnesota. Next came Seminary School in Chicago and marriage. Both endeavors ended quickly. Now, at the tail end of his 20s, he has just quit law school and has no idea what will come next. Back at his parents’ house, he stoically faces their disappointment, accepting their implicit judgment that he is a failure. But his father has arranged for him to work as an intern in his own law firm during winter break, and Tom follows through, finding he enjoys much of the work. Nobody is told he is no longer a student. Then he meets Linda Brekke, a captivating young woman, just days before tragedy befalls her family. The trajectory of his life is about to change. Tom is the first-person narrator, and he gives barely a hint early on that he is looking back from several decades in the future. The bulk of the action takes place in the early 1990s. One of Kilgore’s (Losing Camille, 2010) talents is to place readers in the moment, even if the narrative jumps back and forth through the first 30-odd years of Tom’s life. Each vignette reveals an experienced, meticulous writer of short stories, encapsulating the essence of that individual brief time, although the leaps forward are sometimes abrupt and disorienting. The book’s opening line sets the stage for what will follow: “Life is lived entirely between the ears.” The considerable mental meandering on the nature of the universe and almost anything else that interests Tom— containing more than a little childhood and young adulthood angst—does become wearisome. Here, for example, he ponders musical concepts: “What did it mean to say the treble clef was ‘higher’ than the bass clef? What had height to do with it?...Why do people say I just played an ascending line? Why can’t it just as well be said to be descending?” Yet the reader wants good things for this insecure and grave protagonist who can’t seem to fit comfortably into any identity. When he does finally settle down, it is more the result of fortuitous happenstance than of passion. The final chapters lack the earlier enthusiasm even as Tom finds contentment.
An engaging tale with an earnest hero but a permeating melancholy leaves a lingering sense of disquietude.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63505-559-7
Page Count: 265
Publisher: MCP Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
