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WHORE

Hard to get a handle on this very French-feeling, waiflike work that teases like a meal the anorexic Cynthia isn’t allowed...

A seemingly interminable (in spite of its size) and sophomoric exercise in automatic writing pursuing the existential woes of a 20-year-old escort-cum-prostitute.

She calls herself Cynthia, after the dead sister she never knew back in her religious home near the Maine border, and she entertains a loathing for her bedridden, useless mother and pious, fire-and-brimstone father. Cynthia is a student in literature at McGill University in Montreal when she answers an ad for an escort service and begins servicing up to eight men a day in a discreetly provided room with bed and bath. She prefers working the daytime, like a regular nine-to-five job, and isn’t above enjoying the earlier clients, though it’s the repetition—as she reveals in her melodramatic first-person sentences that ramble on without punctuation for pages—that’s killing. French Canadian author Arcan actually describes a few of these customers, thus elevating her debut novel above the tedious, self-loathing litany of the analysand. We meet the Sabbath Blackbird, an aged Jew dressed in black, with gray sidelocks, whom Cynthia imagines as “Moses from my catechism courses and my father’s Bible . . . honoring God in whoredom” as he masturbates to her gyrations; and Jean the Hungarian, who has a withered arm and myriad scars that, as they discuss literature, they never mention. Cynthia for the most part free-associates about the hate she feels for her yellowing mother; about her father, steeped in a fear of sex that left the daughter eternally small and infantile; about obsessions with her fleeting youth and perfection (plastic surgery helps); and about dreams of death. All these she shares with her psychoanalyst, the true love of her life, though he gives nothing, not even a response.

Hard to get a handle on this very French-feeling, waiflike work that teases like a meal the anorexic Cynthia isn’t allowed to swallow: ill-nourished fiction, overall, suggesting unconvincingly that this “caged life is the only one possible.”

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-8021-7002-1

Page Count: 172

Publisher: Black Cat/Grove

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004

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NORMAL PEOPLE

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

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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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THE BLUEST EYE

"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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