Mary and O'Neil: A Novel in Stories

by J. Cronin and Justin Cronin

Book Overview

WINNER OF THE PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD - "An astonishingly good first novel . . . fully engaging from the first paragraph. What a gift: to be able to live alongside these people for a while."--Ann Patchett, Chicago Tribune

Mary and O'Neil: They are like any other couple. They have survived loss and found love and managed the occasional hard-earned laugh as they move toward the future, hearts thick with hope. Each human life is ever...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385333595
• ISBN13: 9780385333597
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

An astonishing portrait of how we live

Years into the future people will mistake these years (1999-2001) as only about technology, fear, rigged elections, etc. But if this book lasts (and it should), people will see that regardless the external climates of countries and politics, the drama of one's life is one's life. There are few authors writing today who so honestly handle their characters. The prose is, to use that overused term, illuminating. But it is a prose that serves only to lead the characters' direction, never to blind the reader with its wattage.This book is so phenomenal that I bought a copy for all of my upper-division English students at the college where I teach. Since then, students have come to me of both sexes, shy and proud, to tell me how they raced through this book, ravished. The sports jocks of the class wept, the class cynic thought he'd lighten up a bit, the class beauty carried it close to her person long after finishing it.Submit to this book and be thankful for literature.

A Wonderful, Emotionally Satisfying Work

Mary and O'Neil was certainly a surprise for me. I thought it would be a nice collection of connected short stories, but it is so much more than that. The stories work more like a novel than a collection and Cronin has done marvelous things with these stories. They follow two people, O'Neil, who is nineteen when we first meet him, and Mary, the woman he eventually marries. Each story us about an emotionally pivotal experience that has ramifications for the rest of their lives, ramifications which surface in each of the following stories. The stories are wonderfully written and affecting. Each story could have been the springboard for a fully developed novel. Cronin fits so much in these stories in a terrifically effortless and smooth manner. I highly recommend this one.

An Emotional and Beautiful Story

I was caught up into this book after the first few pages. Even when I sensed that things wouldn't happen as I had hoped, I couldn't stop, even briefly. These are people you will come to care for and wish you knew. After I finished the last page, I immediately went back and started reading the first chapter again. I think you could go around and around again in this book.

The best I've read this year (so far)

Ordinarily, I hate books of the "Novel in Stories" variety. I usually find them to be a confused jumble of pieces without any elastic to hold them together. I admit that I had low expectations of this work when I started it due to this prejudice. What a pleasant surprise!Other reviewers have mentioned the beauty of the prose, so I will skip a description of it. Suffice to say that it is not only beautiful, but clever. If you happen to be a writer, you will find yourself WISHING that you could condense the essence of being into phrases like Cronin's. The weaving of the stories is extraordinary: how many times have you read about a character and wondered what his/her parents were like, or what his wife was like before she entered the plot at their first meeting? Here you get that depth of information, not only through the strength of the writing but also through the structure and selection of the moments Cronin chooses to reveal. I'm not sure when the last time a book moved me to tears was, but this was one that did.

Magnificent debut--the best I've read in years

This is the Cronin's debut, but it feels like a classic from the first page. Readers meet the title couple, Mary and O'Neil, in a series of stories which chronicle episodes from their lives, and can be read as a novel or as a collection of short pieces. The real satisfaction is Cronin's exquisite prose: his stories find their power in the subtle revelations of the characters' emotional lives. There are passages on almost every page that had me in awe of this man's talent, and I was most pleasantly surprised by the overwhelming sense of discovery I felt with this book--remember the first time you found an author who immediately became a favorite, whose writing you savored, and whom you couldn't wait to share with all your friends? As I read Mary and O'Neil, I was reminded of the feeling I had when I first found the works of J.D. Salinger, and later, Anne Tyler and John Updike...think back to discovering your own favorites and that excitement that you felt as you turned every page, knowing that you'd found something important, not just to you, but in the larger scheme of things. If Mary and O'Neil is any indication, Justin Cronin is destined for greatness. This first collection/novel is among the most promising debuts I've seen in years.