Reviews for On the Ball

The average rating for On the Ball based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-19 00:00:00 Peter Jennings Children's book with disability rep!!!!! I mean it's really a children's book meant to teach about inclusion and equality, and it's sweet and cute and Yossi and Laibel are goofy Jewish troublemakers with good hearts.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-11 00:00:00 Sam Nicholson These words are imbued with a despair so raw that not even once during the time I was reading this did I feel an ounce of regret envisaging the time the novel drew to its inevitable conclusion. In fact I was eager for it to be over, for the narrator to stop pouring forth her endless stream of inchoate conjectures and unsavoury insinuations. Prior to this, I have slogged my way through Vollmann's 800-page behemoth (The Royal Family) which, despite its uncompromising sincerity and profound sympathy for the dispossessed of the earth, features depravities of the highest order and I continue to do battle with Leslie Marmon Silko's righteously fiery tirade in Almanac of the Dead which takes pleasure in referencing every known and unknown stomach-churning theme under the sun simply to make the reader squirm in their seat. But somehow Anne Enright's seemingly innocuous concoction of blood bonds and family drama contains more unpleasantness than the two works combined. I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns. All I have are ravings, more like. Every statement or harmless speculation opening a window into the narrator's world provides a disconcerting view of an emotionally repressed, traumatized individual. One who is outwardly an ordinary woman grappling with the challenges of a moderately satisfactory marriage at the sunset of her youth. A mother of two tiptoe-ing around her own life like a trespasser. But it's only her relationship with her recently deceased brother Liam which seems to give her life substance, endow it with meaning and purpose, rooting her to a particular point in time and memory from which she cannot detach herself despite best efforts. In a way she seems like a listless, disembodied spirit propelled only by the currents of happenstance, mundane daily occurrences, and passive-aggressive conversations with her siblings and ambiguous husband, always ever grazing the surface of the truth - the truth of a summer spent in her grandmother's place long ago with her brother Liam - until the time she finally shuns hesitation and divulges that closely guarded, wholly repugnant secret. A secret so complex and incomprehensible (even to its keeper) that it seems to have hijacked her life in retrospect and delineated the downward trajectory of decline and eventual self-destruction that Liam was doomed to follow. They are a bundle of nerves, frayed at the ends. They are wearing each other away; both of them amazed by the thinness of skin that happens just there; how close they can be, blood to blood, so that the ticking, afterwards, of one inside the other, might be a joke, or a pulse-the beating in your veins of someone else's heart. In a sense, the entire novel reads like the narrator's rambling, extended letter of apology to a brother she failed to rescue in time, both in the distant and recent past. It is piercing and earnest. Besides Anne Enright never indulges in the folly of distilling the 'issue' into easy dichotomies of 'moral' and 'immoral' but uses words - clever, cutting, precise words - to make sense of the incident which serves as the seam of the narrative. But unfortunately enough this is a particularly breed of fiction which impairs my ability to feel empathy for any of its characters, even though I'm always acutely aware of its power. There is just too much hurt, too much toxic resentment lurking between the arrays of words that seem to percolate into a reader's blood like insidious poison. Even passages sketching a commonplace scene of domestic bliss are pregnant with implications that my mind refused to parse fully out of some hazily-defined fear. The sex scenes made my skin crawl. Sometimes I felt I was going to drown in my own revulsion for this book. People, she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed. And yet I cannot deny the truth of Enright's masterful unravelling of this yarn which allows the reader to partake in the shared experience of a 'free fall' that seems to have been Veronica Hegarty's life for thirty-nine years. In the end, I am unable to love but I can grudgingly admire.