A mesmerizing collection of stories about the secrets that keep us.
A gifted American fiction writer tackles little slivers of crime from the points of view of young women on the verge of self-discovery.
Had these hardhearted stories of trespassers, exiles and beautiful losers come from one of the regular blokes, readers would label them noir and call it a day. But in the hands of superlative writer van den Berg (What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, 2009), these stories seem to dig a little deeper and resonate a little longer. In the opening story, “I Looked For You, I Called Your Name,” a woman on her honeymoon realizes a series of natural disasters is merely a precursor to the looming tragedy of her own marriage. “Opa-Locka” is a traditional private-eye story about two sisters playing detective, waiting to see how the story ends. Two fantastic and very different stories are the collection’s highlights. “Lessons” captures a moment in the risky lives of a gang of rural youngsters who have reimagined themselves as stickup artists. “Why didn’t they go to school and get regular jobs and get married and live in houses?” it asks. “The short answer: they are a group of people committed to making life as hard as possible.” Meanwhile, in “Acrobat,” a woman whose husband abandons her in Paris falls in with a band of street performers who adopts her as one of their own. In “Antarctica,” a rather uncommon housewife travels a vast distance to a remote scientific base at the South Pole to discover how her brother died. “The Greatest Escape” finds a young woman wrestling with the long-ago disappearance of her father. Finally, the title story successfully integrates all of van den Berg’s gifts for stories of mistaken identity, unresolved menace and uncomfortable insight. With prose as crisp and cool as that of Richard Lange or Patricia Highsmith, van den Berg is someone to keep track of.
A mesmerizing collection of stories about the secrets that keep us.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-17723-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
PROFILES
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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