An intelligent, deeply felt, quirky, and original novel that lives up to its ambitions.
A forensic anthropologist encounters a series of complicated interconnections in this novel.
Dr. Clarissa Circle, an English major–turned–forensic anthropologist, has a mantra: “No one ever touches anyone.” She insists on it as her guiding principle, but it’s often questioned by other characters and tested by events, which connect to one another in numerous ways. In 1999, at age 32, Clarissa begins her first postdoctoral job as a new professor at the University of Kentucky. When a “puzzling glut of ritual murders” occurs in the area, Clarissa becomes a consultant to the Lexington police. She and Sgt. Willy Cox begin a relationship that’s later rocked by mutual infidelities and jealousies. Clarissa analyzes skeletons found in a mass grave, which could relate to a rumored “blood cult” from the early 1970s. These rumors are confirmed by Methuselah, a former hippie who attended the university in that era. In a local forest shack, two dead bodies are discovered that have been there for a considerable length of time—an apparent double suicide. Meanwhile, a mentally ill man stalks a female student; another woman lives in his boardinghouse whom Clarissa dubs “Petite Artiste,” as she often stands outside and sketches Clarissa’s rented house—the same house where a woman whose body was found at the mass gravesite used to live. Another female boarder is romantically obsessed with the artist and secretly follows her. At the same time, three English students share a house—seemingly a separate story, yet their lives have points of connection with other characters, too. And an old man becomes a Lexington street-corner prophet, his stream of phrases taken as oracular by growing crowds. As these various mysteries and relationships unfold, are solved, remain obscure, or end in violence or romance, characters consider the nature of chance and patterns. Along the way, Taylor (Pineapple, 2017, etc.) tells an entertainingly complicated, interwoven story that is, by turns, funny, horrifying, and tender. Philosophy, physics, literature, and historical events, such as the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, all play roles, making this a novel of ideas as well as a complex murder mystery. One of its chief ideas is the question of how much people actually contribute to pattern-making rather than simply perceiving it. At one point, for instance, Methuselah, in a spot that was once occupied by a Civil War monument, comments on the “fermenting connection among a renegade Confederate general, his stallion, a methhead, and a hoary-haired gent babbling unrelated babbles. Obviously, my friend Willy the dashing detective was getting to me with his Jungian synchronicities.” Different narrators, each with his or her own style, swap around storytelling duties, providing checks on different points of view as well as skillful revelations of character. It is somewhat disappointing when it’s revealed that a key to Clarissa’s character is repressed childhood trauma, which feels like an overused plot device. However, this is a relative quibble among so much inventive brio.
An intelligent, deeply felt, quirky, and original novel that lives up to its ambitions.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-58838-330-3
Page Count: 376
Publisher: NewSouth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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