Sharply observed but limited in scope: more by the way of background, or some other dramatic depth, could make such dim and...
Fourteen stories set in Pittsburgh describe the quiet griefs of everyday life: a second collection from McCafferty (Director of the World, 1992; One Heart, 1999).
McCafferty’s prose is better as portraiture than storytelling, and most of these tales are as much vignette as narrative. The beaten-down father of “Light of Lucy,” for example, has a brief flight of fancy (involving Lucille Ball) while waiting in a parking lot for his daughter, but his story is little more than a sketch of a desperate man (divorced, depressed, unemployed) short on answers. Similarly, the narrator of “Brother to Brother” offers an interior monologue on the difficulty of life, addressed to a beloved elder brother who may, in fact, be already dead. The unhappy young couple who bicker pointlessly in “You Could Never Love the Clown I Love” are brought up short by an encounter with the older couple next door, a circus clown and his wife, who complain about the noise of their endless arguing, while the young couple of “So Long Marianne” seem perfectly happy and in love until the girl sees a child in her store and is thereby (possibly) reminded of some misfortune in her past. “Stadium Hearts” depicts the loneliness of an elderly philosophy professor who breaks into a baseball stadium to recall his dead wife and son and the ballgames he refused to take them to, there encountering the widow of a ballplayer who has also broken in to recall the past. “Dear Mr. Springsteen” is a fan letter to the Boss from a middle-aged Pittsburgh lady who tries to explain what an effect Springsteen’s Rising album had on her and an inner-city boy she played it to, while the title story is a thank-you note from a troubled woman with an unhappy past to an old friend who helped her through a bad patch many years ago.
Sharply observed but limited in scope: more by the way of background, or some other dramatic depth, could make such dim and shadowy characters worth caring for.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056453-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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