Readers of Abeel's earlier books may not find much new here, but that may be perfectly fine. Those who haven’t tried her...
Abeel (Conscience Point, 2008, etc.) returns to a favorite subject here, following three women from their heady days at artsy Foxleigh College in the mid-1950s through the next several decades of hopeful and heartbreaking life.
Julia, Audrey, and Brett bond over their desire to follow a different path than the one expected of girls in their time, despite the paucity of role models and opportunities. They mustn't end up like classmate Lyndy Darling, who drops out of school to marry well and have babies. But they do desire romance, partnership, and a modicum of stability, unlike their other classmate Rinko Park, a Yoko Ono doppelgänger who cares nothing for convention of any kind. Stuck somewhere in the middle, the women forge ahead, buffeted by their own youthful decisions but also the classist, sexist world around them. Julia, a beauty with a knack for self-portrait photography, puts her art on hold when she pairs up with Bodie Curtiz—Audrey’s golden-boy half brother—for a marriage that fulfills half her needs beautifully while leaving the other half to molder. Audrey, having closed herself off to romance after a brutal rape, channels her energy into becoming a wildly successful author with a compartmentalized life. Brett, the most obvious choice for an author stand-in, is also the most realistic in that her thoughts and actions are nearly always at odds. Chasing after the Beats in Paris and then escaping to academia, she is her own worst enemy. Abeel’s gimlet-eyed narration is dense and vivid. Enough of the book takes place among the American gentry to qualify as escapist reading, and it comes laced with gleeful, biting commentary. Toward her three protagonists, she is unsparing and compassionate in perfect proportion.
Readers of Abeel's earlier books may not find much new here, but that may be perfectly fine. Those who haven’t tried her yet—women and men of all ages—should give her a try.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68003-103-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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