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MALAVITA

A smart fish-out-of-water conceit, but it’s a little ungainly, never quite settling on a tone with which to crack wise about...

Neither the witness protection program nor rural France can tame a Mafioso in this seriocomic romp.

A best-seller in Benacquista’s native France, this novel centers on Giovanni, a one-time mobster who’s escaped New Jersey with his wife, son and daughter after turning evidence against his former compatriots. Re-settling near Normandy, Giovanni, aka Fred, decides to sit down to write his memoirs, telling the neighbors he’s working on a book about World War II. But his cover is blown almost instantly; and not just because he’s largely ignorant about military tactics. He can’t help brandishing a hammer while negotiating with a plumber, and an invitation to discuss Goodfellas with the locals leads to an extended bit of oversharing that has his FBI minders in a panic. Benacquista is careful not to make this novel an outright farce—Fred’s wife, Maggie, takes on charity work as a response to the immorality she married into. But the story thrives on absurdities and coincidence, particularly in a virtuoso scene that shows how a casual utterance by Giovanni’s son travels from the school paper into the hands of mobsters eager to hunt down the family. Benacquista softens Giovanni’s character enough to court the reader’s sympathy for a coldblooded killer, but it’s never entirely clear if the author is gently sending up Mafia tropes or outright mocking them. The townspeople trade in plenty of anti-American stereotypes, and the climax satirizes action movie themes—thugs, bumbling authorities and all. The book takes its title from the name for the family dog (Italian for “lowlife”), but it’s clear who we ought to attach the name to. Likable but occasionally vicious, Giovanni is conflicted but not exactly nuanced.

A smart fish-out-of-water conceit, but it’s a little ungainly, never quite settling on a tone with which to crack wise about its wiseguys.

Pub Date: June 25, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-14-312385-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

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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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THE BLUEST EYE

"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970

ISBN: 0375411550

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

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