Sentence by sentence, it's smooth, even vivid—but the grossly overextended whole adds up to good writing wasted on an...
There's a lot of abusive palaver and not much substance in this labored third novel from the punk-surrealist author of Cock and Bull (1993), Great Apes (1997), and other fetchingly deranged assaults on good taste, convention, and stuff like that.
One wants to admire an imagination that could conceive of this novel's afterlife—a rundown hinterland in which the dead hold jobs and intermingle more or less normally by the living-as experienced by its foul-mouthed narrator Lily Bloom (James Joyce is surely spinning peevishly in his grave), an American woman who dies of cancer in a London hospital. But Lily simply rattles on and on, about her two daughters, uptight Charlotte (who's infertile) and cokehead-whore Natasha ("Natty," who's anything but); her many marital and extra-curricular sexual frolics; the State of the World, as encapsulated in odd little throwaway observations ("Saddam invaded Kuwait and my girls indulged their own cravings"); and—most curiously—her relationship before and after death with fellow patient Phar Lap Jones, an affable aborigine (named after his country-creature, a famed racehorse) who covets Lily's false teeth, for which he bargains, promising to ferry her safely out of the land of the living. A few cheeky inventions amuse intermittently (sex is still available even after one has passed on, though Lily wryly notes that "live johns were numb to the dead hookers' insubstantiality"), but there simply isn't enough of a plot to justify even two hundred and fifty pages' worth of this jaded mockery. Nor is Lily much fun: she's a bundle of indignations, whose high-pitched rants accommodate far too many lame anti-Semitic gags (of course she's a Jew herself, so we're probably supposed to see the humor in her continual recourse to such conversational bytes as "D'jew know?" and "Mindjew").
Sentence by sentence, it's smooth, even vivid—but the grossly overextended whole adds up to good writing wasted on an underimagined and tiresome premise.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1671-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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