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Book Reviewed by:An exquisite, heart-breaking novel by an Irish discovery.
Radiant with beauty, longing, and desire, and deeply touching, this literary novel, reminiscent of the works of William Trevor and Colm Tóibín, evokes the long love affair between a man and a woman, each married to another, who meet every month in a decaying hotel in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
On a bitterly cold winter's afternoon, Michael and Caitlin, two middle-aged lovers, escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit date. Once a month for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven, the place in which they have abandoned themselves to their love.
These beautiful, carefully-rationed days have long sustained Michael and Caitlin's love, and have helped help them survive the tedium of their lives separate from each other. But now, amid the howling winds whipping off the Atlantic, and a snow storm blackening the horizon, this nearly abandoned resort feels like the edge of the world. On this winter day, burrowed in their private cocoon, they will discover that their lives are on the brink of change.
Michael's wife is battling cancer, and Caitlin's husband is about to receive a major promotion, which will involve relocating to the Midwest. After half a lifetime together in their most intimate moments, certain long-denied facts must be faced, decisions made, consequences weighed and, maybe, just maybe, chances finally taken.
A quiet, intense depiction of love and intimacy, My Coney Island Baby reveals, within the course of a single day's passing, the histories, landscapes, tragedies and occasional moments of wonder that constitute the lives of two people who, although living worlds apart, have been inexorably drawn together. But even in this most private of retreats, a place seemingly built for romance, the most heartbreaking of realities loom.
I
The Boardwalk
The air out here is mean with cold. It was bitter on the journey out from Manhattan too, but nothing like this. This is bleakness without respite. An hour in the subway was an hour shielded from the wind, and now it is almost noon and already threatening snow. Michael and Caitlin walk quickly, side by side, heads lowered, shoulders hunched. Apart from a couple of drunks in a doorway arguing mutedly over a bottle, and further out past Nathan's along Surf Avenue an elderly black man leashed by a length of orange clothes line twine to a ridiculously small dog, the streets feel deserted, locked down. Most of the stores along here are shuttered too, some closed for the season, others having already written off the day as a bad debt. Passing trade is below freezing. The few places that insist on remaining open – a liquor store, a 7-Eleven, some sort of a goodwill shop with stacks of used, spine-cracked paperbacks in wicker baskets still out on the window ledges and ...
He writes steadfast descriptions of the natural world bearing down hard on the two lovers on this particular harsh day. And it's not only nature that gets this treatment, Michael and Caitlin's emotional lives get it as well, which, in turn, taps into our emotional lives, making this novel not just a read, but an experience too – because O'Callaghan's text basically says: "Follow me softly. I will also tell you the story of your life here."..continued
Full Review
(645 words)
(Reviewed by Rory L. Aronsky).
Here we are, at the famed Coney Island in Brooklyn, through the eyes of Billy O'Callaghan in his novel My Coney Island Baby. The air is "mean with cold." Snow's coming, so along Surf Avenue, past Nathan's Hot Dogs, "most of the stores along here are shuttered…some closed for the season, others having already written off the day as a bad debt." It's cold here. The rising, relentless wind "gusts and swirls." Not a season for beachgoers to dash down the promenade, seeking the magic that Coney Island is famous for. O'Callaghan points out the ocean. As he sees it: "The horizon line has been rubbed away and there is nothing beyond the loose logic of suggestion to differentiate between water and sky."
Nothing but gray. What can we do to ...
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