A gripping and sensitive portrait of ordinary people wrestling with ideological passions.
Homophobic politics meshes with a woman’s memory of the Holocaust in this debut novel dealing with moral panic.
In 2009, Ludka Zeilonka, an octogenarian art professor in Hampshire, Massachusetts, looks back on a past packed with tragedy and intrigue. As a Polish Roman Catholic in the anti-Nazi underground during World War II, she spirited Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, one of whom, Izaak, became her husband. She’s still carrying a torch for her lost wartime lover Oskar and hiding a famous portrait of Chopin that she smuggled out of the country. A new season of persecution erupts around her when her gay grandson, Tommy, is fired from his high school teaching position for assigning gay-themed literature to his Advanced Placement English class. The action is part of a homophobic campaign ginned up by the fundamentalist Redeemer Fellowship Church and its studiedly avuncular pastor, Royce Leonard, along with his followers in the state legislature and on the school board. The furor embroils Tommy’s father, a powerful state senator estranged from his family by his relentless political calculations, and escalates as the teacher is savagely beaten and Ludka and Izaak face harassing phone calls and bricks through their windows. Meanwhile, Oskar’s grandson contacts Ludka, raising her hopes of a reunion but also threatening to expose her for art theft. The politics of Dempsey’s saga don’t ring very true: it’s hard to imagine anti-gay pogroms gaining traction in modern-day liberal Massachusetts, and the insistent comparison with the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto is heavy-handed. Fortunately, Dempsey treats the human dimension of her story with nuance and skill. She crafts complex, compelling characters on all sides, including a conservative talk radio host who supports Leonard’s campaign but is troubled by the ensuing violence and delves into the sense of grievance among Christians who feel oppressed by, well, having to read gay-themed literature. She grounds the narrative in evocative prose that conveys mood and psychology through realistic, precisely observed details—“She rose, took a healthy swallow of vodka to ballast herself, then tried to ignore the way the tumbler wobbled as she lowered it to the side table”—and makes a potentially melodramatic tale feel absorbing and real.
A gripping and sensitive portrait of ordinary people wrestling with ideological passions.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-308-3
Page Count: 399
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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