One of contemporary fiction’s most ebullient and versatile stylists strikes again—straight to the heart.
Four novellas, each in its own way elegiac and tributary, from the accomplished North Carolinian author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) and Plays Well with Others (1997).
The slightest and most conventional, “He’s One, Too,” picks up the gay themes prominent in several of Gurganus’s earlier stories: it’s a remembrance of the scandal created by a “beloved local church and business leader” entrapped and arrested on a morals charge—a charge by the boy (now middle-aged) who had loved the older man hopelessly, and found mirrored in the former’s “offenses” his own emergent homosexuality. “The Practical Heart” (winner of a National Magazine Award) recounts both the early years of its narrator’s Scottish great-aunt, a resourceful spinster whose reduced fortunes stimulated her fascination with portrait painter John Singer Sargent, and his own relationship with her in her old age, which he has lovingly captured and mythologized. All four stories are set in, or hearken back to, the sleepy hamlet of Falls, North Carolina—portrayed perhaps most affectionately in “Preservation News,” a memoir of flamboyant Tad Worth, after his death of AIDS: a “preservationist” who loved and lobbied to save beautiful old houses, sashayed around Falls with Capote-esque gusto, and left a legacy of compassionate engagement with his world that’s crystallized in the story’s memorable central set piece—a delicately haunting biracial ghost story. Even better is “Saint Monster,” in which a 50ish classics professor recalls his puzzled, loving relationship with his father and namesake (“the ugliest white man alive in Falls”), a long-suffering traveling salesman repeatedly cuckolded (now there’s a switch) by his infantile wife, and the bearer of a compromising secret from which he stoically shields his son. This is a triumph of subtle, slowly building characterization, and more: a compact epic of deeply entangled and enigmatic parental, marital, and filial devotion and duplicity. Unforgettable stuff.
One of contemporary fiction’s most ebullient and versatile stylists strikes again—straight to the heart.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-43763-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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