Strong ending—but we saw it before, in René Clair’s Le Million, wasn’t it, with franc notes blowing wildly all over Paris?
The Literary Laureate of San Francisco (The Angels of Catastrophe, 2001, etc., none reviewed) focuses largely on Frisco’s gritty Mission district and its grimy lowlifes.
The greasy morning haze over the district might be what TS Eliot calls the objective correlative for Plate’s characters, like melancholy Hamlet’s black suit, though Plate never makes this match-up with his morally fogbound parolees and drug dealers. He employs an inspired fairy-tale hook to compel the reader to hang on despite thin plotting and at times even thinner writing (What’s wrong with these sentences?: “Holding the money in her palsying hands, the paper shimmered in the daylight”; “Clad in a polyester imitation sarong and an orange suede halter-top, her hair was dyed bright cadmium yellow”), while every paragraph thuds with the passive voice in deadening strings of “was” and “were.” The hook: a Ford Taurus careens onto Market Street and overturns a Brinks armored truck carrying perhaps $3 million. The bloodied guards lie unconscious while sacks of brand-new $100 dollar bills fall from the open doors and strewn bills whip about in the breeze (is it a breezy fog?). Mama Celeste, 80 and religious, just rebuffed at the Social Security office, finds herself standing amid bills, hides a linen Brinks sack under her coat, and hauls it to her room at the rock-bottom Allen Hotel, where she loses count of her take but thinks it may be a million. So she fills a shoebox with a hundred grand and goes out, as God’s messenger, to give to the poor and needy, many of them lying on the streets like spent condoms or cigar wrappers. Also at the Allen: parolee Stiv Wilkins, 25, whose itch to burgle runs as deep as Jean Genêt’s. He, his wife, and baby face eviction; he owes a paranoid black drug dealer, and is in deep merde with his psyche, seeing Mexican ghosts everywhere.
Strong ending—but we saw it before, in René Clair’s Le Million, wasn’t it, with franc notes blowing wildly all over Paris?Pub Date: June 7, 2004
ISBN: 1-58322-639-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
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