Although Mazza almost drowns her novel in detail and alternative story lines that don’t quite go anywhere, the overall...
From the ambitious Mazza (Girl Beside Him, 2001, etc.), an overstuffed novel about an emotionally paralyzed woman who finds herself living out a ghost story on the coast of Maine.
Tam was a champion swimmer until she had her first epileptic seizure at 13 and never swam again. She was ahead of her brother in the lap, and although everyone else believes he saved her life, she believes he grabbed her leg to slow her down. She has never forgiven him, or forgiven her mother for not pushing her to compete again. Tam has kept her life tightly controlled to avoid another epileptic seizure, although her last occurred years ago, shortly before she graduated college. Now in her 40s, she is comfortably retired from a lucrative career in finance. When her younger sister Martha—whose self-proclaimed quest to bring history to life mirrors the author’s—e-mails the research she’s done on their mother’s family history, Tam heads to Southport on the Maine coast to look into the story of her great-great-grandfather, a lighthouse keeper who possibly saved the life of a shipwrecked baby in the 1870s. Tam soon stumbles onto another story. In 1931, an unknown woman showed up in Southport, walked out to the lighthouse, drowned and supposedly still haunts the coastline. The lighthouse’s current caretaker, Tam’s fourth cousin Nat, prefers to think of Tam herself as the ghost, a role Tam enjoys as they begin an intensely sexual affair. Meanwhile, Tam finds an abandoned infant at a laundromat, turns him over to authorities, then helps his teenage mother steal her baby back. The three hide out at the lighthouse with Nat’s help. The Internet is an integral element of the author’s storytelling, as Tam sorts through family history and comes to terms with her own psychic ghosts.
Although Mazza almost drowns her novel in detail and alternative story lines that don’t quite go anywhere, the overall result packs a lingering wallop.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-933368-84-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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