DeLillo's latest novel asks compelling questions, but its answers are a bit shopworn.
A cryogenic facility beyond the edges of civilization provokes a series of meditations on death and life.
“The thinness of contemporary life,” DeLillo writes in his 16th novel. “I can poke my finger through it.” This sentiment reverberates throughout this elusive book. Set in part at a facility in the trackless steppes of a former Soviet republic, it tells the story of a Manhattanite named Jeffrey, his financier father, and his stepmother, Artis, who has traveled thousands of miles to be cryogenically preserved. Artis is dying, but then, DeLillo makes clear, so are all of us, every day, our lives a series of choices, less drama than determination as we move through a world we cannot control. And yet, here at the end of life, there seems a promise: that we can take charge of our destinies once and for all. “Terror and war, everywhere now,” DeLillo suggests, “sweeping the surface of our planet….And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia.” In removing ourselves from everything, then, even the inevitability of death, we achieve a kind of purity. This, of course, is classic DeLillo, the tension between body and mind. How do we live the more we distance ourselves from our common physicality, the more we lose ourselves in circuits, video clips? From Great Jones Street (1973) to Running Dog (1978) to Underworld (1997), DeLillo has long traced the power of the image both to illuminate and to insulate. In this new novel, however, such tropes lack a certain urgency. Partly, it’s the static nature of the narrative; this is a book, after all, about waiting to die. But even more, it’s that these concepts no longer seem so revelatory in a world as overmediated as ours. No, in such a culture, it is not death that moves us so much as the question of how to live. Or, as DeLillo puts it: “Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am.”
DeLillo's latest novel asks compelling questions, but its answers are a bit shopworn.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3539-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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