While the novel's structure can at times feel claustrophobic — this one-to-one correspondence between the triggering present and the recalled past — Lillian's voice is anything but. Highly energetic and supremely self-knowing, not a little boastful and perpetually clever, Lillian slices the world with bright blades of humor. She makes it her business to say precisely what she sees ... Rooney proves herself to be a tireless puppeteer in Lillian Boxfish — a writer with no apparent end of the cleverly turned phrase, the thoughtful insights into advertising, the intelligent musings on the process of creation. Rooney is marvelously self-aware as well, anticipating readerly responses right there in the pages of this book ... a perfect fusing of subject and writer, idea and ideal, voice and voice.
From the first page, the story lives up to the packaging...[an] irresistible book ... Each encounter is its own funny and touching vignette. And each memory, too, mixes both public triumph and private sorrow ... This witty and heartfelt ode to a city, to its infinite variety, to its melting pot of citizens not only enchants but offers an important lesson: that human connections and work are what give life meaning.
Lillian’s story spans most of the 20th century, touching on racism, the AIDS crisis, immigration and women’s rights, but Lillian Boxfish is more ode to flânerie or slant screwball comedy than historical novel or social critique. Despite her brilliance, we learn, Lillian never achieves earning parity, is forced out of a job during pregnancy and — like Margaret Fishback — would have faced regular workplace harassment, yet her story often lacks friction. Even her wrenching personal troubles develop largely offstage. Such omissions keep our self-assured heroine firmly in command as she strolls the city streets, but the novel is weaker for its uniform tone and averted conflict.
The map, which seems innocuous enough, is an important orienting device for the narrative. Its gesture at navigational accuracy gives the novel an interactive quality that compels readers to extend Lillian’s knowledge of the city, to discover what has become of the landmarks of Lillian’s 1984 journey ... [Rooney] endow[s] her narrator with historical knowledge in a way that allows meditation on loss while also setting into relief the movement of history ... It’s not that I think Rooney should have made Lillian an anachronistically woke ally, but I do find the reckoning she receives for trying to Columbus hip-hop a bit unsatisfying.
The ads are long gone and her poetry is out of print. But a new century is lucky enough to be introduced to Ms. Fishback, at least in fictional form, in Kathleen Rooney’s witty new novel ... 'The point of living in the world is just to stay interested,' Lillian thinks at one point. Time spent with Ms. Boxfish could never be boring.
Lillian’s excursions — come rain or shine, she’s been walking these sidewalks for nearly 60 years — not only provide her with a ‘rich reserve of encounters with odd, enthusiastic, decent people’ (tonight’s is a specially gallant bunch), but also solace and inspiration … Although it’s definitively not a biography, Lillian is based on Margaret Fishback, the most successful female advertising copywriter in the world in the 1930s, who worked for the real RH Macy’s and also published poetry. The details of Rooney’s heroine’s life are all invention, though, and thus, in a similar mingling of fact and fiction, she’s a career girl in the line of Maeve Brennan, wearing Vivian Gornick’s walking shoes.
...a disarming feminist picaresque ... Rooney’s versatility and ambition (poetry, memoir, scholarship as well as fiction) rival those of her indefatigable subject. While the novel is strong in concept, it disappoints in language and character depth ... Compared with the nuanced elders in recent novels by Cathleen Shine, They May Not Mean To, But They Do and Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night, Lillian emerges as a feisty caricature. Then again, a work of light fiction may be the perfect testament to a career of light verse.
