The crystalline metaphysician-ironist is only sporadically present in this distorted, frustratingly opaque world.
High finance, terrorism and paranoia, and various new technologies, all are targets in DeLillo’s darkly satirical latest: a bleakly funny footnote to such earlier anatomies of contemporary malaise as The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), and Mao II (1991).
The story surveys a single April day in the year 2000 as experienced by 28-year-old billionaire financier Eric Packer, a risk-taking epicurean who might be the considerably more jaded elder brother of William Gaddis’s eponymous preadolescent corporate mogul “J.R.” We first encounter Eric in his customized stretch limousine, where he “visits” with such functionaries as his sullen Czech security chief Torval, young-geek technical consultant Michael Chin, chief of finance Jane Melman, and sonorous “chief of theory” (actually an abstracted efficiency expert) Vija Kinski, among others. We learn that he’s playing a dangerous investment game, “betting” on fluctuations in the value of the yen; that sexual encounters with his middle-aged mistress and Amazonian personal trainer don’t ease a seemingly un-consummateable fixation on his wife, poet and heiress Elise Shifrin; and, in interpolated chapters, that a stalker plans to assassinate him. Meanwhile, the limo’s progress is slowed by a presidential motorcade, violent protest demonstrations, a rap star’s funeral procession, and a film crew at work in the streets. DeLillo assembles these quirky particulars expertly—and he still writes better sentences than any other contemporary author. The tale is ingenious and amusing, and there’s a chilling logic to its eloquent climax, in which Eric encounters his would-be killer and learns why he has apparently been “engineering . . . [his] own downfall.” Unfortunately, though, Cosmopolis is laden with abrupt, arbitrarily off-putting gnomic utterances (e.g., after Elise orders a restaurant salad, “She dug right in, treating it as food and not some extrusion of matter that science could not explain”).
The crystalline metaphysician-ironist is only sporadically present in this distorted, frustratingly opaque world.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4424-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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