Meat-and-potato realists should steer clear, but those who appreciate artifice and abstraction in fiction—including language...
A self-consciously artful concoction by memoirist Alhadeff (The Sun at Midday, 1997) skims the surface of a glamorous woman’s life as shaped by her djinn, the spirit that’s taken residence in her body.
Although the djinn adds italicized commentary from time to time, particularly at the beginning and end, to remind readers of its importance, most of the story is narrated by the unnamed young woman. Of Jewish descent and raised in Japan and Italy (not unlike the author), the woman attends an elite European convent, then works in Milan for a designer she calls “the master.” There are elaborate dinners—the narrator lists the menu for every meal—and beautiful clothes (described in detail). The narrator also analyzes how she became “entangled with homosexuals,” who are ultimately unavailable yet willing to be pleased more easily than heteros. She has an affair with a bisexual actor, but when marriage seems a possibility, the djinn steps in to keep the narrator’s spirit free. Said narrator ends up in New York (how is not explained), working frantically as a writer to pay for her expensive apartment and being involved with Hare, a married man whose wife spends much of her time in Mexico. Hare does something with art that requires travel and dinner parties full of highbrow chat. His 89-year-old mother, “the Princess,” whom the narrator met in Europe independently of Hare, comes to New York and stays with him. She wears blue dresses with low-slung belts and reads Kant. The narrator takes care of the Princess even when Hare is away. The radiation treatments the Princess undergoes for cancer are the most alive moments here, and the relationship between the two women the most developed and heartfelt. But the Princess returns to Italy to die.
Meat-and-potato realists should steer clear, but those who appreciate artifice and abstraction in fiction—including language describing the narrator having her “limbs waxed”—may be intermittently charmed.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40234-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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