An absorbing, engaging, and finely crafted novel about the abortion debate.
Orbach (Transgressions and Other Stories, 2013) weaves a story focused on a young doctor, two women in his life, and an abortion clinic in this socially minded volume.
“It was still only the beginning of our lives,” observes Jenna early in the novel as she and her fellow residents at a Boston hospital gather to celebrate one of their birthdays. This is before Jenna’s teenage sister gets pregnant; before her friend Phil—whose commitment to helping women is described as “almost pathological”—opens a women’s health clinic in upstate New York. One of the women he helps is Adele, who comes to rely on Phil following the deaths of her parents in an accident. She tries to be supportive of Phil’s career choices, though she worries about their ramifications. Jenna, who has long harbored unrequited feelings for Phil, returns from a year in Africa to assist at the clinic, but her emotional baggage —both familial and romantic—colors her ability to function dispassionately. Set against the culture wars of the early 1990s, when anti-abortion activism often turned violent, the stories of Jenna, Phil, and Adele intersect to illustrate the difficulty of holding on to ideals in a clinical environment and a cynical world. (At one point, Phil recalls: “People ask me sometimes why I made such a point of wanting to do abortions and maybe start a clinic—and then, later, why any of us kept on, even though it meant living in a combat zone.”) Orbach is a tremendous writer, her voice effortless and her sentences as smooth as a morphine drip. She is always attuned to her characters’ feelings, even as they try to hide their emotions. Here Jenna hears from Phil that he and Adele are having a baby: “The room seemed to tilt, as if I might be spilled back into the snowy street. ‘God bless,’ I said after a moment. It would never change, then.” The issues surrounding the abortion debate are ever present, yet the book’s tone is never preachy: histrionics are for activists, while Orbach’s doctors are (almost) always focused on the task at hand. It is this dichotomy between passion and calm—between saying something and talking yourself out of it—that frames the story’s central conflict, challenging readers to feel more than they’re normally comfortable doing.
An absorbing, engaging, and finely crafted novel about the abortion debate.Pub Date: May 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5889-2
Page Count: 322
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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