As always with Minot, moments of incisive and telling beauty, mood, and atmosphere, but also, in this case, much that’s much...
Minot (Folly, 1992, etc.) aims high in taking a long look at the beginning and end of a love-life—in a project that’s not without its gripping moments but that requires an excess of artifice to stay aloft and doesn't steadily convince.
Ann Lord, 65, is dying of cancer, attended by a nurse and her various adult offspring from three not-so-happy marriages. In matters of love, Ann’s entire life, it seems, has been in one way or another less than blissful—though all might have been otherwise if things had been slightly different back in 1954—when Ann was 25—during a gala seaside weekend celebrating a friend’s marriage. Those were the three days when Ann met (—The person’s face seemed lit from within—), loved (—The great thing was happening to her—),and lost (to another, by a cruel twist of fate) the ultra-handsome doctor and Korea vet whom she (though not necessarily the reader) fell in love with at first sight(—His tall legs kept coming toward her—). Minot’s decision to pin the whole weight of the novel on one weekend causes much strain, and her best successes come when she drops romance altogether and lets her character(† la Mrs. Ramsay) meditate on loss and the passing of time (—. . . they would last and not she . . . .The things in the house were not herself—). Elsewhere, though, the burden of making the 40-year-ago weekend (—the highest point in one’s life—) significant enough for the book to work tempts the author back into her familiar Hemingway-style filler-mode (—Ann had had feelings with a few other boys and with each there was something particular . . . which was unique and it seemed that the. . . feeling around Harris Arden was more unique than usual—) or into topping the story with a sensational event to try to up the psychological ante.
As always with Minot, moments of incisive and telling beauty, mood, and atmosphere, but also, in this case, much that’s much less.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40037-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party. The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising. But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party. Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.Pub Date: June 13, 1949
ISBN: 0452284236
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1949
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
© Copyright 2025 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.
