A celebration of the lonely little guy who fights back, but too schematic to convince or engage.
Sailor/novelist Michelsen (To Sleep With Ghosts, 1992, etc.) sets his latest on Cape Cod, where the environmental toll of urban sprawl—plus the anguish of fishermen trying to compete with big boats—is more affecting than the plight of his overdrawn and overloaded protagonist.
Michelsen adds heft to the story of Ollie Cahoon, the seemingly doomed fisherman, by interrupting the narrative with short chapters from a fictional book about the ecology of Cape Cod. The information there—facts about population growth, geology, the water supply—validate Cahoon’s responses to developers, who want his inheritance, and to the local fishing authorities and factory ships, who are making it impossible for him to earn a living from the sea. Cahoon’s life is a mess: his marriage is on the rocks, his wife tired of the uncertainties and dangers of fishing; he’s been in jail for armed robbery; and he’s frequently in trouble for drinking and brawling. Cahoon’s a victim, if somewhat headstrong and stupid, but his heart is basically in the right place: he cares about the sea, overfishing, and preserving the land. The tale opens as Cahoon, confined to a wheelchair, is about to go on trial for shooting local developer Thatch Hallett. In flashbacks, Cahoon recalls how his life fell apart as he tried to keep on fishing, his mate Pig left for easier work, and Billy, his inexperienced brother-in-law, made a costly mistake and was badly injured in a storm at sea. Cahoon’s family, which includes a kayak-rowing mother, a gay great-uncle, and a sister with a baby and no husband, sympathized, but couldn’t help. So when it all got to be too much, Cahoon reluctantly agreed to sell the water rights to the land on which Hallett was building a shopping mall. A visit to the site of what was once pristine marsh is wrenching, though, and he decides to take action.
A celebration of the lonely little guy who fights back, but too schematic to convince or engage.Pub Date: June 29, 2001
ISBN: 1-58465-081-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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