Library's review
I love Cronin's literary fiction, having read The Summer Guest a number of years ago. I expected this book to be a similar experience and it was in some ways, but different in others.
The title characters are a man and woman, a married couple. You'd think a book named Mary and O'Neil would be the
None of that is meant to be criticism of the book itself. Once I adjusted my expectations of what it was about, I enjoyed the meandering journey through the lives of Mary, O'Neil and Kay. And the writing is simply gorgeous, as when O'Neil's mother talks to her son at Kay's wedding:
She looked at him, pleasure filling her like water pouring into a vase: her grown son just back from his first two weeks at college, all smooth white teeth and rangy limbs, his eyes glowing with champagne. How had it happened? Why did she miss him so, when he was standing right there?
Or this succinct description of a pregnant women:
Mary is enormous; she is a cathedral, a human aria, a C note held for ten minutes. She feels luminous, beyond gravity; she is gravity itself.
And just one more, the moment when O'Neil learns about his parents' fate:
When he opened the door to his room and saw the college chaplain there, and his roommate, Stephen, and then noticed behind them his track coach, talking in a low voice to the dormitory's resident advisor, and their eyes, a luminous chorus of compassion, rose all at once to meet his own where he stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, he knew something awful had happened, and also what it was; before anyone could speak, a hole appeared in O'Neil's heart where his parents had once been.
The title characters are a man and woman, a married couple. You'd think a book named Mary and O'Neil would be the
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story of a marriage, and I guess it is, sort of. But the title really should be O'Neil and Kay, because the central relationship is between O'Neil and his sister, and particularly his reliance on Kay to process the grief he feels after their parents are killed. And even that doesn't become clear for some time. Mary doesn't appear until Chapter 3, and she doesn't meet and marry O'Neil until Chapter 8 (in a book of 11 chapters).None of that is meant to be criticism of the book itself. Once I adjusted my expectations of what it was about, I enjoyed the meandering journey through the lives of Mary, O'Neil and Kay. And the writing is simply gorgeous, as when O'Neil's mother talks to her son at Kay's wedding:
She looked at him, pleasure filling her like water pouring into a vase: her grown son just back from his first two weeks at college, all smooth white teeth and rangy limbs, his eyes glowing with champagne. How had it happened? Why did she miss him so, when he was standing right there?
Or this succinct description of a pregnant women:
Mary is enormous; she is a cathedral, a human aria, a C note held for ten minutes. She feels luminous, beyond gravity; she is gravity itself.
And just one more, the moment when O'Neil learns about his parents' fate:
When he opened the door to his room and saw the college chaplain there, and his roommate, Stephen, and then noticed behind them his track coach, talking in a low voice to the dormitory's resident advisor, and their eyes, a luminous chorus of compassion, rose all at once to meet his own where he stood in the doorway with his keys in his hand, he knew something awful had happened, and also what it was; before anyone could speak, a hole appeared in O'Neil's heart where his parents had once been.
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Description
"Mary and O'Neil frequently marveled at how, of all the lives they might have led, they had somehow found this one together. When they met at the Philadelphia high school where they'd come to teach, each had suffered a profound loss that had not healed."--Jacket.
Awards
PEN/Hemingway Award (Winner — 2002)
Language
Original publication date
2001