World Literature, Fiction Subjects

Mary and O'Neil

Name: Mary and O'Neil
Author: Justin Cronin
ISBN: 9780385333597

by Justin Cronin

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Overview

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. How likely was it that they could learn to trust, much less love, again?

Justin Cronin’s poignant debut traces the lives of Mary Olson and O’Neil Burke, two vulnerable young teachers who rediscover in each other a world alive with promise and hope. From the formative experiences of their early adulthood to marriage, parenthood, and beyond, this novel in stories illuminates the moments of grace that enable Mary and O’Neil to make peace with the deep emotional legacies that haunt them: the sudden, mysterious death of O’Neil’s parents, Mary’s long-ago decision to end a pregnancy, O’Neil’s sister’s battle with illness and a troubled marriage. Alive with magical nuance and unexpected encounters, Mary and O’Neil celebrates the uncommon in common lives, and the redemptive power of love.

Synopsis

New York Times Book Review - Sylvia Brownrigg

[An] artful debut . . . .Cronin writes clear and careful prose, and is admirably fearless in the scope of his imagination.

About the Author, Justin Cronin

Born and raised in New England, Justin Cronin is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Awards for his fiction include the Stephen Crane Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. He is a professor of English at Rice University and lives with his wife and children in Houston, Texas.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
In unassailably well-crafted prose, novelist Justin Cronin offers us the story of an ordinary family placed under extraordinary circumstances and held together by the solid footing of love and intimacy. Remember how deeply moving Terms of Endearment was? The 1983 movie, starring Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, brought the emotional and physical realities of cancer out from behind closed doors, taking on the complexities of family relations under extraordinary circumstances, breaking ground in its portrayal of mothers and daughters. And it explored what it means to keep on living and find happiness in the face of death. This is the territory of Justin Cronin's debut novel, Mary and O'Neil.

We first meet O'Neil through the eyes of his parents, whose powerful story of married love opens the novel. O'Neil is a bright, athletic, good-natured college sophomore, the apple of his parents' eye. Their road trip to his college for parents' weekend becomes a crucible for the family's emotional quandaries, both expressed and unexpressed. After 30 years of happy marriage, Arthur has just passed unscathed (or at least uncompromised) through his first bout with adulterous temptation. Miriam has an acorn-sized lump on her breast that she hasn't told anyone about. Neither of them knows exactly how to adjust to the adulthood of their children, particularly their new adult relationships. Miriam can't bring herself to trust her daughter, Kay's, new husband, and Arthur experiences surges of alpha-male defensiveness when he meets his son's new girlfriend. Both Miriam and Arthur are taking their first tentative steps toward growing old together, reconciling their differences and affections in a very slow but tender dance toward the inevitable.

Beyond the life and destiny of their parents lie the unfolding lives of O'Neil and Kay. O'Neil casts about -- as most of us do -- throughout his 20s, losing his footing and finding it again when he begins to build a family of his own. A paragon of classical reversal, Mary -- O'Neil's devoted wife, the mother of three, a driven graduate student -- is, when we first meet her, an aimless waitress, pregnant out of wedlock and indifferent to the baby's father. O'Neil's marriage to Mary is his bedrock as he finds himself confronted with the horrible prospect of losing his sister, now a divorced mother of three, to cancer. As the last palpable traces of O'Neil's happy, supposedly normal childhood in suburban New York fade with Kay's agonized death, O'Neil comes to understand and acknowledge the unalterable permanence of those bonds that are formed in love.

Minna Proctor is a writer and translator. She lives in New York

Sylvia Brownrigg

[An] artful debut . . . .Cronin writes clear and careful prose, and is admirably fearless in the scope of his imagination.
— New York Times Book Review

From The Critics

Cronin's new book begins with a dream, a reflective, tender hush that will sustain the tale to come. The mood is one of encroaching loss, and the characters we meet will genuinely suffer. They will not, however, become embittered, nor will they lose their capacity for love. There are eight stories here; together they give shape and hue to the protagonists' quiet lives. O'Neil, when we meet him, is a college student just stepping into his life. Mary, for her part, is afloat with good intentions and a certain indecisiveness. O'Neil will tragically lose the parents he loves. Mary will abort the baby that she is too young to have. They will find healing, then, in one another, and in the simple progress of their lives, and they will be saved as well by improbable touches—by the odd coincidence, by the almost overwhelming goodness of perfect strangers, by the profusion of telling dreams. Cronin leaves the primary action to the left of his stage—the deaths, the abortion, the wedding, the revelations are mostly summarized, made retrospective, dreamed through. In their stead are elegant passages about everyday life, the vital ways in which we can and must care for one another's souls.
—Beth Kephart

Publishers Weekly

The title of Cronin's debut collection of eight interconnected stories, set between 1979 and the present, implies that the content will be devoted to the relationship between the eponymous duo. Instead, they don't appear in the same tale until halfway through, detailing their marriage in their early 30s after both become teachers. Before this, there's a lengthy opening story concerning the events leading up to the accidental death of O'Neil's parents, Arthur and Miriam; another story on how O'Neil and his older sister, Kay, cope with the aftermath; and a third about the abortion Mary has at the age of 22. After the wedding, the stories still don't always focus on the pair, with one devoted solely to Kay's own dysfunctional marriage. Cronin, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is an accomplished craftsman, and at times his prose is quite moving and beautiful, though the sadness he channels is too often uninflected by humor. Playing out variations on the theme of the inability of parents and children to truly know one another, Cronin is capable of creating fresh poignancy. Readers interested in going straight to the best of the collection should head for "Orphans" and "A Gathering of Shades," in which the author affectingly paints how the two siblings help each other through the pain of living and dying, showcasing the real love story here. Agent, Ellen Levine. (Feb. 13) Forecast: This is a promising debut collection, and national print advertising in the New Yorker and alternative weeklies should target the appropriate readership. Sponsorship announcements will also feature the title on NPR. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

It is 1979, and 19-year-old O'Neil Burke has it all. He's in love, successful in college, and warmed by the affection of his parents and older sister Kay. After a weekend visiting their son, the Burkes, protecting each other from dark, unshared secrets, drive off an icy embankment and die. O'Neil's mounting losses include his girl, his career ambitions, and any sense of direction. Eventually, he finds his way back into a pleasant life, teaching high school English in Philadelphia and marrying Mary. More sorrow solidifies the bond between O'Neil and his sister when she fights a losing battle with cancer in her late thirties. Cronin's key mistake in this fine series of linked short stories about a family weathering crushing blows is indicated by his misleading title. Mary, who makes her first appearance nearly 100 pages into the book, is not nearly the presence that O'Neil, his parents, and his sister are. This is too bad, as the scenes between Mary and O'Neil are rich with affectionate humor, leaving the reader wanting more. Nevertheless, this is a worthy first effort by a novelist worth watching. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/00.]--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

With subtlety and grace, a first novel—actually a series of eight linked, chronologically arranged stories—illuminates momentous if commonplace events in the lives of a modern New England family. It's 1979, and O'Neil's parents, Arthur and Miriam, are preparing to visit him at his New Hampshire college. Each has a secret: she's just learned that she probably has breast cancer; he's just written a note to Dora Auclaire, a family friend he believes he's fallen in love with. Those secrets are never divulged (though Arthur's note will surface later). On their return to Glenn's Mills, New York, they take a wrong turn in a snowstorm and are killed; their deaths will reverberate throughout these pages. O'Neil's future wife Mary is introduced well into the novel, working rather aimlessly at a bar in a Minnesota college town not far from where she grew up. Pregnant by her artist roommate, a man she doesn't particularly like, she decides on abortion:"How terrible, she thought, to be twenty-two, and already have the worst thing of her life to remember." Cronin only sparingly sketches the details of how Mary and O'Neil meet, while their wedding is related in a brilliant passage titled simply"Groom." Late for the ceremony, O'Neil remembers his parents:"He holds the picture in his mind as long as he can, until ... the signal breaks up like a radio station gone out of range." Nothing very unusual happens to the couple. They become teachers, have children, incur debts, face marital problems. Much of the story's second half is taken up with O'Neil's sister Kay, now stricken with cancer. Throughout, O'Neil himselfiscast in the everyday roles of son, brother, husband, and father, yetCronin infuses these passages of common life with a tenderness and depth that draw the reader in. A quiet debut, its very understatement giving rise to its poignancy and strength.