Smart, well-written, and thoroughly gripping.
Following her biography of a jazz-loving great aunt (The Baroness, 2013), Rothschild shifts gears to imagine art-world shenanigans prompted by a long-lost Watteau painting in her first novel.
Readers know the painting’s creator and name from the prologue, which opens on the day of The Improbability of Love’s highly publicized auction. To show how it got there, Rothschild rolls back the action six months to introduce her engagingly disheveled heroine, Annie, a shellshocked refugee from a failed long-term relationship struggling to find her professional and emotional footing in London. Annie buys the painting on a whim in a junk shop, never dreaming that it’s anything important. Jesse, a young painter she meets in a museum, sees genius in this portrait of a man hopelessly gazing at an adored woman, but Annie’s more interested in making a good impression at her new gig as chef for icy Rebecca Winkleman and her father, Memling, proprietors of a powerful art dealership. Memling, an Auschwitz survivor with an uncanny knack for bringing high-quality paintings of vague provenance to market, is not what he seems and has a very pressing reason for retrieving the painting now in Annie’s possession. Rothschild deftly spins an elaborate web of intrigue involving a raft of sharply drawn secondary characters, including Annie’s alcoholic mother and an aging bon vivant who helps rich people spend their money. But the story’s emotional center is Annie’s quest for recognition—many scrumptious descriptions of meal preparations reveal her as a brilliant cook—and battle-scarred reluctance to realize that sweet Jesse is the man for her. Even the painting gets a few monologues (amusing, though adding little of substance) as the action moves through multiple, often nail-biting plot twists—yes, there are a few convenient coincidences, put across by the fast pace and vivid prose—toward a slightly hasty but nonetheless satisfying resolution.
Smart, well-written, and thoroughly gripping.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87414-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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