A mature (though not in the R-rated sense) view of adult love—smart, carefully written and always fluent.
Luxurious, emotionally charged story of a love gone wrong—in about a week’s time.
The “white” of the title could refer to the wintry landscape, or to the blazing lights of Manhattan, or perhaps to the learned, tormented crowd in which Aciman’s intellectually inclined protagonist moves, a tribe of people with names such as Muffy and Hans. “I am Clara,” one fellow dinner partier announces behind the Christmas tree, which prompts Dostoyevskian inquiries on our narrator’s part, yielding the aperçu that “strained, indifferent, weary, and amused…it slipped between us like a meaningless formality that had to be gotten over with.” Meaningless formalities turn into catty exchanges that border on the cruel, then into elective affinities and tender mercies, as our narrator finds himself swept up in a falling-in-love vortex that could go psychotic at any minute but thankfully does not. Aciman (Call Me By Your Name, 2007, etc.) is a poet of the sensitive bystander—not arch like Salinger, combative like Cheever or fraught like Updike, but occasionally stepping into their territories. When his characters say they’re confused, they’re confused—and when they say they love each other, well, the possibilities for misunderstanding are legion. Amid the “tuna-avocado miniature rolls…[and] seared scallop with a sprig of mache on a bed of slithered turnips with tamarind jelly,” out zipping along on the Henry Hudson and the Taconic State Parkway, strolling up on the Upper East Side, his characters talk and act like real people, if real educated and well-heeled people, do. That is to say, they miss each other’s signals with fateful regularity, caught up in their own tangles, but occasionally stealing kisses that taste “of bread and Viennese butter cookies” while hatching plans that never quite play out the way they’re planned. In the end, it seems, every relationship is doomed to failure thanks to a surfeit of baggage—not that we shouldn’t try all the same.
A mature (though not in the R-rated sense) view of adult love—smart, carefully written and always fluent.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-22842-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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"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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