A Review of MAN OVERBOARD! (2026) by Kathleen Rooney

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

In MAN OVERBOARD! (2026), Professor Kathleen Rooney is attempting to write a beachread and a novel for poets at the same time.  Such an enterprise is difficult to urge, yet the authoress does so with exuberance.

This is an exuberantly written fantasia.

Professor Rooney writes as if she were a quaintrelle.  The novel’s prose-style reminds one of the socialite novels of Truman Capote and of Anita Loos.  At times, she impersonates her main character—Kick, a buffoonish young man who drunkenly falls from the deck of a cruise-ship into the Gulf of Mexico.  At other times, she sounds like Kathleen Rooney, poetess.  Many of her sentences are delightful:

Confronting the possibility of his death beneath the sea-swells, Kick’s greatest qualm is that he might never sleep with another woman again: “Dead men have no sex” [11].

Swimming underwater (not a pleonasm), Kirk turns his head to the left and sees an aquatic monstrosity: “A colossal stingray was flying silently not a foot from me, an eerie gray angel” [21].

Floating on the sea without control over direction or destination, Kirk fantasizes about coffee and vanilla ice-cream: “The ionic slurp of the ocean is the only reply” [57].  That is “ionic,” not “ironic.”  The ocean may be described as “ionic” inasmuch as ions are dissolved within it.  The Gulf of Mexico is a marginal sea, but it is, of course, connected to the Atlantic Ocean.

Kick has a colloquy with a sea-turtle with an unpronounceable name.  For some reason, the sea-turtle is wearing a motley cap.  Kick remarks to us: “Her bells jingle in the wavelets” [107].

It strikes Kick that he would be enjoying Thanksgiving with his family had he not slipped from the cruise-ship into the sea: “Puffy white clouds dot the sky like marshmallows atop the sweet potato casserole we’d be eating right about now were this a regular Thanksgiving” [129].

Kick remembers sighting what might be his double at the Nebraska State Fair: “At the dunk tank, a soggy clown in white greasepaint and a traffic-cone-colored wig sat on the collapsible seat over the water, daring passersby to soak him” [153].

As I was reading the text, I could not escape the impression that Professor Rooney had finally liberated herself as an author, despite the apparent influences of Capote and Loos.  She burned away all of the parasites that encrusted the side of her ship.

Self-anointed, uninvited guest-“editors” are parasites—endoparasites, even.  This is the sort of invirile man who would say loudly, behind an authoress’s back, that her first novel is “MY BOOK.”

Such invasive, invirile, invidious men are not poets; they are not even poetasters.  Such uninvited guests are non-poets who hastily type out groan-inducing, illiterate jokes which they call “poems.”

My advice to Kathleen Rooney would be to bream the hull of her ship—bream the hull of its limpets and barnacles by burning and scraping them off.  I would recommend that she detach the thick layer of marine growth that has accreted on the hull and pitch the gastropods and arthropods off the side of her ship and into the ocean—where they belong.

Dr. Joseph Suglia