Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker...
A man contemplates getting back at the novelist who exploited his life in fiction.
Koch’s third novel translated into English (Summer House with Swimming Pool, 2015, etc.) is partly a satire of the petty grievances of the literary world, partly a vision of sociopathic cruelty, though ultimately a little too much of both. The “Mr. M” of the title has had a long career writing novels that have garnered heaps of acclaim but modest sales—with the exception of Payback, his bestselling fictionalization of a much-discussed news story about a pair of teens who were accused of killing a teacher who’d had an affair with one of them. Herman, one of the students allegedly involved, hasn’t been able to let go of the experience decades later; indeed, he lives in the same building as the writer, and as M makes the publicity rounds for a new novel, Herman is increasingly invasive of his personal space, stalking his wife and posing as a journalist to ask some pointed questions of him. Koch (via Garrett’s translation) does a fine job of capturing Herman’s arrogant, narcissistic swagger (“I have certain plans for you…”; “Who are you trying to impress…?”), but he wisely pivots away from Herman’s narration to include multiple perspectives—Mr. M, the troubled teacher, and the classmates who witnessed Herman’s high school antics. (He enjoyed taunting a classmate whose mother was dying, for instance.) Koch suggests that in some ways Herman and M are similar—both exploit others’ pasts, have mean streaks (M fantasizes about mass-murdering his readers), and have troubled pasts to cover up. But that argument isn’t wholly persuasive—Herman’s adolescence was crueler—and the layering of Herman’s back story overwhelms the core mystery story of what truly happened with that teacher.
Koch is consistently attuned to our hidden foibles and fakery, which makes for deliberately discomfiting reading. Sleeker writing would enhance its impact.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90332-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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