Keillor's parodies, satires, and whimsies—which have been appearing in The New Yorker since 1969—rarely provide big laughs or Perelmanic dazzle; but they do have an affectionate, easygoing, back-home quality that makes for a nice change from the clenched-up sparring of most New York-based humorists. (Keillor is Minnesota all the way.) Least distinctive of the 30 pieces collected here are obvious send-ups of trends in jargon and lifestyle: there are familiar, somewhat dated digs at alternative weddings (Sam and Judy "chose to emphasize their mutual commitment to air and water quality, exchanging vows while chained to each other and to the plant gate of a major industrial polluter"); at the craze for communal/natural goods and services ("all of our meat comes from animals who were unable to care for themselves any longer"); at the Foxfire enshrinement of plain-folks (numbing oral histories about making snowmen and customizing cars); and at psychobabble—applied to baseball. Elsewhere, however, Keillor develops a more satisfying double-joke, as in "Shy Rights: Why Not Pretty Soon?"—which lampoons gay-liberation rhetoric while maintaining the ever-apologetic tone of the minority in question ("Discrimination against the shy is our country's No. 1 disgrace in my own personal opinion"). And there are pieces which derive welcome texture from a literary-parody element—like the overlong but endearing "Jack Schmidt, Arts Administrator" (Ã la Sam Spade). But the special stuff here, if not the funniest, is Keillor's just-slightly-off-kilter Americana: folksy reminiscences which may veer into farce now and then but at the same time demand to have their warm, real centers taken seriously. "My North Dakota Railroad Days," for instance, generates train nostalgia while simultaneously skewering it. And best of all are three sweetly addled evocations of early/small-time radio. (Keillor is a longtime broadcaster, host of National Public Radio's "Prairie Home Companion.") Mostly minor-league humor, then, but with enough one-of-a-kind touches (including a few likably autobiographical snippets) to rise just a little above the crowd.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1981
ISBN: 0140131825
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1981
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
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
"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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