Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy.
Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Some ungainly plotting, but the author is one to watch.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! The powerless man must resort to mass murder to show he is not a “soft persimmon”-a patsy. When he is denied justice following his only son’s drowning by a corrupt county official, Lao Da goes on a rampage, killing 17 bureaucrats. But no story makes its point more cleanly than “Persimmons,” in which the peasant Lao Da has already had a run-in with the Birth Control Office for not reporting three extra children. The most overtly political story is “Immortality” (winner of the Paris Review Plimpton Prize), an ambitious allegory cleverly linking the eunuchs who served the ancient dynasties to the fortunes of a young man who’s the spitting image of Mao and is chosen by the state, after the Chairman’s death, to impersonate him. citizen) tells his mother he’s not on the marriage market, because he’s gay. In “Extra,” an unmarried middle-aged maid exults in maternal love for a six-year-old “extra,” the unwanted son of a discarded wife, while in “Son,” a “diamond bachelor” (Chinese-born U.S. The complicated back story overwhelms the intriguing three-way entanglement “Love in the Marketplace” and “The Arrangement” are similarly affected by baggage. The father is Boshen’s ex-lover, a female role actor with the Peking Opera. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” Sasha is in Chicago to get an abortion arranged by Boshen, an older, gay Chinese man. No wonder the American concept of “moving on” is so magical. “I would trade my place with any one of them,” says 21-year-old Sasha, whose movements are restricted in China.
Sasha and Boshen are watching a holiday parade in Chicago, surrounded by carefree young Americans unburdened by history. The state bears down on the Chinese characters in this story collection, Chinese-American Li’s debut.
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