From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In her 20th work of fiction, O'Brien meditates with haunting lyricism on the lure of home and the compulsion to leave. Dilly, 78 and widowed, lies in a Catholic hospital in rural Ireland waiting for her elder daughter, Eleanora, to arrive at her bedside. In gorgeous stream-of-consciousness from the masterful O'Brien (
Lantern Slides), Dilly recalls her early years as well as decades of misunderstanding and conflict with Eleanora. Dilly's past unfolds in fits and starts: she leaves her mother behind in a small village in Ireland to seek a better life in 1920s Brooklyn, returning after a failed affair and the death of her brother, Michael. She promptly marries the rich Cornelius; they settle at Rusheen, his dilapidated family estate, and have two children. For Eleanora's story, O'Brien shifts to the third person: the daughter moves to England, marries an older novelist and begins a successful career as a writer before divorcing him and embarking on a series of affairs with married men, a life that Dilly both envies and scorns. The award-winning O'Brien evokes the cruelty of estrangement while allowing her characters to remain sympathetic and giving them real voice.
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O'Brien remains one of contemporary Ireland's most prominent and enduring novelists, her reputation having survived early-career book-banning in her native country. She has come full circle, now honored in Ireland as highly as she is in the rest of the world. Her new novel trains a spotlight on the personal experiences of one Irishwoman, Dilly, her story proffered by O'Brien as a paradigm of the reality of twentieth-century Irish life. Richly layered plotting and an impressive evocation of setting make for a good foundation for O'Brien's deft, poised, and compassionate fashioning of her chief character. The novel's "real" time is the present day as Dilly, now an old woman suffering from a serious illness, lies in a Dublin hospital and waits for her daughter to join her at her bedside. The situation prompts a journey through Dilly's memory, "the crux of her thinking [being] her family, her children, disentangling the hurts they have caused her." She recalls her time spent in America as a servant and the man she fell in love with there, as well as the man she married upon returning to Ireland and the estate they lived on. Speaking specifically to mother-daughter relationships, this poignant novel also explores the larger issue of the Irish American consciousness: why Irishmen and -women came to America, what they did here, and why many returned home.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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