Crafted with a genteel wit and a landscape painter’s eye: a tale both titillating and charming. It deserves to grace many a...
After a story collection (Silk, 1996), Mazur returns with her first novel, a lively comedy of cast-off conventions given wing in the wilds of southeastern Massachusetts.
Fifty-year-old Maggie, naked in her house one hot June afternoon after hubby Hugh has sailed off in his boat for a few days, discovers a strange man bathing in her basement. Does she call the cops? No—she scrubs his back, not bothering to clothe herself. Thus begins the incredible summer of Grenville, the man in the basement, who has moved in somewhere on Maggie’s property, formerly her grandmother’s farm, and begins to appear, usually hungry, whenever Hugh sails away. Maggie confides her growing obsession with this elusive but demanding presence (he reveals he’s a married man recently stepped out of his former life) to her cousin Jake, a mail-order minister living on family funds who inhabits the adjoining land, but her confession only puts Jake into a funk because for years he’s harbored his own secret yearning for her. When Maggie’s grown children and their families arrive for the annual summer vacation, the plot thickens: troubled-poet daughter Gillian discovers Grenville too. Maggie runs to seek counsel from her cousin after she accepts Grenville’s offer of an overnight sail, thereby only deepening Jake’s despair. But when Gillian comes over later, spilling her own story of nightly forest trysts with his nemesis and seeking advice, he goes over the edge and tumbles into her arms himself. Unfortunately, his longtime intermittent girlfriend Sally chooses just that moment to visit: and her response is also to find her way to Grenville. There’s more, but the high-water mark of the summer’s surging passions comes and goes, and as the waters of lust recede, Jake and Maggie somehow regain an even keel.
Crafted with a genteel wit and a landscape painter’s eye: a tale both titillating and charming. It deserves to grace many a beach chair this summer.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55597-364-7
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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