Oates masterfully renders tension and despair but not the complexity of her subject.
Wounded families survive two men’s martyrdom.
Once again drawn to America’s heart of darkness, Oates (The Man Without a Shadow, 2016, etc.) takes on the incendiary issue of abortion in a long, contorted, and ultimately unsatisfying tale focused on the killing of Gus Voorhees, an abortion provider, by Luther Dunphy, an evangelical. The shooting itself interests Oates less than the aftermath, as each man acquires “a mythic-heroic reputation” and each man’s family is plagued by grief “that is not pure but mixed with fury. Murderous grief, that no amount of tears can placate.” It feels, says Voorhees’ daughter, like “an autoimmune disease.” Both Voorhees and Dunphy emerge as stereotypes: idealistic Voorhees was radicalized in “the sour aftermath of the Vietnam War” when he was a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. Rejecting the chance to join his father’s private practice, he champions women’s reproductive rights, becoming a vocal activist even in the face of death threats to his family. Dunphy, a carpenter, roiled by lust and weak to temptation, is suddenly converted in his wife’s evangelical church; Jesus, he comes to believe, impels him to avenge and prevent the killing of babies. “Free choice is a lie/Nobody’s baby chooses to die,” protestors chant at the Ohio clinic where Dunphy shoots Voorhees. Oates recounts Dunphy’s arrest, trials (the first ends in mistrial), and sentencing; but her interest is engaged more by his beleaguered wife and bitter, sullen daughter, Dawn. Viciously bullied, Dawn is beaten and violated—Oates revels in mud and blood; Dawn’s revenge is bloody, too, as is her later career as a boxer (a nod to Oates’ On Boxing, 1987); but these pale next to a horrifying scene where anti-abortion zealots, including Dunphy’s wife, rescue fetal remains from a dumpster in order to give them a Christian burial. In the last third of the book, new characters twist the plot in puzzling directions, leading to an unbelievable and anticlimactic end.
Oates masterfully renders tension and despair but not the complexity of her subject.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264304-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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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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