Stark and deeply effecting.
In this sequel, 12 years have passed since the fatal hit-and-run at the center of Schwartz’s Reservation Road (1998), and the focus turns from the father of the victim to the perpetrator of that crime and his long-estranged, now-grown son.
Former lawyer Dwight Arno served 30 months in prison for fleeing the scene after the car he was driving struck and killed his son Sam’s second-grade classmate. Dwight is building a tentative new life in California managing a sporting-goods store and dating Penny, a literature professor. He has had no contact with Sam for years. So he’s unprepared and a little thrilled when Sam, a college senior and varsity baseball star, suddenly shows up at his doorstop. Dwight feels he has been given a second chance at fatherhood, however strained the peace between them remains. Then Sam’s mother Ruth, who had already divorced Dwight before the accident and has recently left her second husband after a brush with breast cancer, informs Dwight why Sam has fled to California: He badly injured another boy in a bar fight, the boy is in critical condition, the university has expelled Sam and criminal charges may be brought. Ruth is fiercely protective of Sam. Soon she arrives to take him home to Connecticut. Dwight follows. Sam, horrified by his own capacity for violence and deeply confused, turns for support to Emma, the surviving sister of the boy Dwight killed; although their parents know nothing of their long-term relationship, the two understand each other’s pain. Ruth and Dwight struggle to find a common ground, while Penny realizes that learning the truth about Dwight’s past does not stop her feelings for him. Schwartz (The Commoner, 2008, etc.) uses a minimalist approach. The tone of the brief chapters is matter-of-fact, sometimes harsh. The characters, Sam and Dwight especially, are damaged souls capable of damaging others. But readers will grow to care deeply about whether and how their lives can be redeemed.
Stark and deeply effecting.Pub Date: July 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-679-60511-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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