A fictional account of a young woman's struggles to become an investigative journalist in the early '70s is informative at its best, plodding and colorless at its worst. In a story covering little more than two years, we witness recent college graduate Catherine Gallagher's rise from a writer covering wedding announcements to one doing an exposÇ on welfare families. Under the tutelage of grizzled city editor Jack McGuire, Gallagher learns the ropes at the Rhode Island Wampanoag Times, albeit while still having to handle columns on new recipes and household hints. McGuire, supposedly impressed by Gallagher's spunk (though there's little evidence of it for the reader), lures her away from the women's page. After a story on the closing of a blue- blooded kindergarten, told with biting sarcasm, Gallagher's guts are no longer questioned, and she's ready to slug back countless cups of joe with the guys. Narrow-mindedly, her parents, whom she still lives with, are outraged by her upstart investigative reports, as is much of her readership. McGuire, however, falls in love with her, and the two begin to sneak off to out-of-town motels. Though he constantly berates her, McGuire has her best interests at heart and suggests that Gallagher apply to other newspapers, including the Depointe Bullet, in the tough working- class city of Depointe, Michigan. The managing editor there, charmed by her gritty application letter, hires her. But Gallagher learns that landing the job is easier than keeping it, what with all the in-house politicking, the sexual harassment, and the necessary challenge of holding her own with her hard-drinking fellow newsmen. By the close, both reader and Gallagher have learned much about the inner workings of the newspaper business before computers, but, given the surprise ending, it seems all for naught. McGarry's (The Courage of Girls, 1992, etc.) slow-paced disclosure of one woman's attempt to break into journalism delivers the whole package—people and plot—in a manner and style sufficiently mundane as never to sweep up the reader.*justify no*
Pub Date: July 31, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5634-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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