Hard on the heels of Theft (1989), another Bellow 100-pager in paperback original: this time the tale of one Harry Fonstein, saved from the Holocaust by the underground organization of Broadway impresario Billy Rose (Bellarosa, to the wartime Italians), then later cold-shouldered by the show-biz celeb himself. Having fled the Nazis from Poland to Italy, Fonstein finds himself mysteriously wafted from a Rome jail cell to end up, by a subtle and devious route, endowed with an American wife named Sorella (overweight, a teacher of French) and living successfully as a businessman in New Jersey. Naturally enough, Fonstein wants to meet Billy Rose and express his gratitude ("I owe him my life"), but his calls aren't answered, he's turned away at the office, and once—at Sardi's—he's forcibly prevented from approaching the man himself. Fonstein may or may not be resigned to such unnatural rebuffs, but his persistent wife Sorella certainly isn't. In 1959, she and Fonstein are vacationing in Jerusalem when the rich and famous Billy Rose is there also—dedicating a memorial garden. The obese but passionate Sorella has brought with her the wildly incriminating secret diaries of a disgruntled (and deceased) staff member of Rose's—with which she confronts him, threatening publication if he won't agree "to sit down with my husband for fifteen minutes." Result? No go. Billy Rose won't budge ("Remember, forget—what's the difference to me?"). A moment of laugh-aloud comedy ensues, yet nothing changes: Rose won't see Fonstein, people's lives go on. The narrator of the story—a shirttail relative of Fonstein's who has become rich by running a memory institute in Philadelphia—tries to get back in touch with Fonstein and Sorella 30 years later, casting doubt on his own thesis that "memory is life" and peering into an abyss that the high-rolling Billy Rose ("Tiny, greedy, smart") just may have seen long before him. Subtle, complex, and tricky, a wry-toned look deep into gloom: fine, vintage Bellow in the shorter form.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1989
ISBN: 0140126864
Page Count: -
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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