Question: when are three or four John Cheever stories less welcome than one? Answer: when, as here, those three or four stories are fragmented and intertwined into a novella—an itchy, neither-here-nor-there form which, unlike the short story, doesn't frame the delicate late-Cheever melange (nostalgia, satire, fable, spirituality) with structural sureness. The principal story-line, recalling "The World of Apples," offers an elderly gentleman in love—or is it lust? Lemuel Sears, a twice-widowed computer-industry executive, spies beautiful real-estate woman Renee in a Manhattan bank, is swamped with reborn Eros ("She could have been the winsome girl on the oleomargarine package or the Oriental dancer on his father's cigar box who used to stir his little prick when he was about nine"), and is soon her insatiable lover; however, when Renee—an elusive sort dedicated to New School-style self-improvement—proves to be cruelly fickle, Sears promptly finds himself in a low-key, tender affair with. . . Renee's middle-aged doorman. (His "next stop, of course, was a psychiatrist.") Is this love or lewdness? That's a familiar Cheever theme. And the intermingled subplots here involve another Cheever standby: clean, pure water as a symbol of the old verities, of love's cleansing force. Sears, you see, is personally funding an investigation into the polluting of Beasley's Pond up in Connecticut (he loves to skate there), so there is a series of black-comic suburban vignettes tenuously linked to the matter of the Pond: the story of the Italian barber who, poverty-stricken, is hired by the Mafia-like "organization" to oversee the corrupt-government dumping at the Pond; the story of the barber's neighbor Betsy Logan—who gets into a brawl with the barber's pushy wife at the Musak-ridden supermarket, who misplaces her baby on the highway, who finally uses desperate measures (fighting poison with poison) to stop the pollution at Beasley's Pond. And we're explicitly told how all the strands here should connect up: "The clearness of Beasley's Pond seemed to have scoured [ Sears'] consciousness of the belief that his own lewdness was a profound contamination." Yet, despite some elegant stitchwork, Cheever never really overcomes the feeling that these are short-story fragments artificially brought together in an uneasy, uncharacteristically disjointed narrative; and, as a result, the risky maneuvers which are often magical in a seamless Cheever story—sudden jolts of black-comedy, wildly implausible twists of Fate—more often fall flat here. A failure, then? Perhaps. But, like Graham Greene's unsatisfying novella/fable Doctor Fischer of Geneva, this offers distinctive rewards along the way: a handful of moodily haunting images, a few choice ironies, much gorgeous prose—including an inspired, freewheeling sequence in which Sears explains to himself why being rejected by Renee is like being transported to a village in the Balkans. And, however flawed the overall composition here, Cheever readers will probably feel, quite rightly, that such genuine morsels of joyful art are too precious to pass up.
Pub Date: March 10, 1982
ISBN: 0679737855
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982
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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