As Murphy's sixth book for adults (Signed, Mata Hari, 2007, etc.) gets started, a large-animal veterinarian in rural New England faces various small uncertainties: an iffy economy, weird recurrent lights in the night sky, a marriage in which there are minor flare-ups.
He has unspecified medical issues, too; his "levels" are volatile and worrying, and he resists going to the doctor. Murphy tells the tale mostly through the vet's reports—alternately no-nonsense and taciturn ("Call," "Action," "Result") or expansive and playful ("Who Walked Into the Hospital Room While I Was Moving My Hand Like the Spaceship")—of the calls he receives from animal owners, and the innovative form is perfectly suited to the doctor's voice: calm, cheerful, attentive, reliable, but also naggingly worried and prone to withhold or diminish the sources of his anxieties. One may be tempted at first to see him as a worrywart whose sense of foreboding is exaggerated, maybe an effect of the gathering chill of fall, which augurs another long, cold, mostly idle winter. Then, while he's hunting on his property with his 12-year-old son, the boy is accidentally shot in the shoulder and topples from a stand, lands on his head and lapses into a coma. The vet and his family try gamely to hold things together, but the strain is awful, and everyone in the small community seems to him a suspect. But is this a mystery worth pursuing, or merely a distraction from his real duty? He's never quite sure. Eventually a familiar-looking stranger—whom the vet takes to calling "the spaceman"—arrives in a whirring electric car and asks a favor that will have enormous implications for the entire family. Murphy is a subtle, psychologically perceptive writer, and the book has a wry humor that's laconic and surreal and shot through with the tender mysteries of family life. A marvelous book: sweet and poignant without ever succumbing to easy sentiment, formally inventive and dexterous without ever seeming showy. A triumph.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202314-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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