The premises are not believable and the exposition, tedious and overblown. A disappointment.
The Palm Springs Man of the Decade suddenly remembers that his gains are ill-gotten and his life built on lies.
"Late in the second decade of the twenty-first century," Harry Tabor is the king of his world, about to be honored for his philanthropy at a fabulous ceremony that's bringing his three adult children back to town to celebrate with him. Unfortunately, a nasty series of recovered memories begins to hit him during a tennis match the day before the ceremony. First, he remembers something he hadn't thought about since 1987—that he left behind a pair of dachshunds named King David and Queen Esther when his family moved from Connecticut to California. He abandoned his dogs? No one can mistake this for anything but the sign of a rotten soul and dark revelations to come. Next (still at the tennis court, by the way), he sees a white-robed cantor. "Who is he to Harry? Why is he seeing him? Or why is he being shown him? The face, it seems familiar, a face he has seen before. But where? He hears daguerreotype; registers that it, too, is reverberating only in his head, spoken in a voice dry and unfamiliar to him." The series-of-questions technique of development is used frequently in Wolas' (The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, 2017) second novel, another big book coming surprisingly close on the heels of her very successful, rather long debut. While that mysterious inner voice is guiding Harry through the process of recalling his sins, his children show up with troubles of their own, though nobody is honest with each other in this supposedly loving family. One has a stalled academic career and a secret job at a hospice; another has an imaginary boyfriend; the third has a non-Jewish wife who is leaving him because he tentatively expressed interest in exploring his faith. Strangely, all the buildup in the first four-fifths of the novel simply fizzles out in the last section. The ponderous writing is the last nail in the coffin. "Her mother was a prominent child psychologist and often said to her children, 'You can do anything you want if you have thought it through and are capable of articulating your reasoning. In other words, so long as you can show your work.' " Would anyone ever say that clunky line once, much less often? Sigh.
The premises are not believable and the exposition, tedious and overblown. A disappointment.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-08146-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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