All of the Irish clichÇs—drink, religion, and more than a touch of blarney—strut their stuff in this satirical first novel that, mindful of the great native literary tradition, tries to amuse as well as dazzle. Set in Killoyle, a place as much obsessed with its growing relations with Europe as it once was with Britain, the story follows the lives of some of the town's finest citizens: Milo Rogers, the waiter and would-be poet; Patrick Murphy, the barman at Spudorgan Hall, the local hotel; Wolfetone Grey, in charge of the hotel's catering; Emmet Power, the hotel manager; Kathy Hickman, columnist for Glam, a women's magazine; Father Doyle, the parish priest; and Thomas ``the Greek'' Maher, a sleazy developer. As to be expected in farce, these lives intersect or connect in lively and improbable ways and, this being an Irish story, the humor is often rather dark. Lives and substance are wasted on alcohol, dreams are more vivid than reality, and real happiness seems at best unlikely. Plot is secondary to character, but there's enough to hold together a narrative obtrusively interrupted by jokey footnotes on almost every page. Among the events: The aging Father Doyle drinks to help him accept that he'll never revisit Rome, where he spent a happy year in his early priesthood; Maher schemes to increase his property holdings; Murphy is fired and becomes a terrorist; Milo is promoted, then begins a typically dilatory Irish courtship of the still lissome Kathy, who once posed for a British porn magazine; Wolfetone, obsessed with a religion whose adherents' names begin with G, goes mad; and Emmet Power and his wife find a pleasant billet running a Jesuit college in Italy. Poor Father Doyle, promised a post in Rome, dies before he can take it up. Despite the often strained humor, Boylan's debut succeeds as a work in which the telling is more important—and more beguiling- -than the tale.
Pub Date: May 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-56478-145-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
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Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in white society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her white persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
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The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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