Weldon’s not exactly challenging herself here, but she’s still one of the sharpest, most entertaining novelists around.
A characteristic blend of social and sexual satire from Weldon (Rhode Island Blues, 2000, etc.).
Grace Salt, 55, has just served a 15-month jail sentence for trying to run over 32-year-old Doris Dubois, the ultra-polished host of trendy TV show ArtsWorld Extra who has made off with Grace’s husband, real-estate developer Barley. All three are dismayed to find themselves collectively in attendance at a charity event where a portrait of hostess Lady Juliet Random will be auctioned off to benefit her pet cause, Little Children, Everywhere. Doris lusts after Lady Juliet’s $275,000 Bulgari necklace. Barley loves to buy his new wife jewelry but is financially overextended while he waits for government approval of the Opera Noughtie development in Edinburgh. Grace is disconcerted to find herself pursued by the portrait’s painter, 29-year-old Walter Wells, though that doesn’t prevent her from ending up in bed with him after she impulsively makes the winning bid on it. Their affair steadily trims years off Grace and adds them to Walter; by the time her self-absorbed son arrives from Australia, she looks young enough to be his sister. Doris, maddened by Grace’s good luck, pursues Walter to paint her portrait and drugs him into having sex with her. She’s a classic Weldon villain, from her total self-absorption to her viciousness with employees even when it’s manifestly against her self-interest. (She fires the assistant whose research makes her look knowledgeable on the air.) Most of the other characters are quite lightly sketched, though always with Weldon’s customary cogency; similarly, the running jokes about endless house renovations and menacing Russian investors are amusing but hardly new. Nonetheless, when it all comes to a head at the party Doris throws for Barley’s 60th birthday (typically, she doesn’t know he’s actually turning 59), readers can only rejoice at her comeuppance and enjoy the mayhem.
Weldon’s not exactly challenging herself here, but she’s still one of the sharpest, most entertaining novelists around.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-796-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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