Sharply observed but perhaps a bit too sprawling, Foer's novel bites off more than it can chew.
Foer’s (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, 2005, etc.) first novel in 11 years aspires to be a contemporary Jewish epic.
The book is not unlike a Jonathan Franzen novel crossed with one by Philip Roth. Like Franzen, Foer details the disintegration of an American family against the backdrop of a larger social breakdown—a 7.6 earthquake, epicentered beneath the Dead Sea, that devastates both Israel and the Middle East. Like Roth, he investigates a basic question: what does it mean to be a Jew? That all of this is more complicated than it appears is the point of the sprawling novel, which showcases Foer’s emotional dexterity even as it takes place across a wider canvas than his previous books. Beginning just before the bar mitzvah of Sam Bloch, a precocious if disconnected 13-year-old, Foer traces a well of family trouble (dying elders, dying pets, the relentless testing of all boundaries), culminating in the separation of Sam’s parents, Jacob and Julia. Jacob is a TV writer and Julia is an architect, and their relationship has withered beneath the onslaught of their responsibilities. “She needed a day off,” Foer writes of Julia. “She would have loved the feeling of not knowing how to fill the time, of wandering without a destination in Rock Creek Park, of actually savoring a meal of the kind of food that her kids would never tolerate.” This is great stuff, written with the insight of someone who has navigated the crucible of family, who understands how small slights lead to crises, the irreconcilability of love. Where the novel runs into trouble, however, is in widening its lens to the geopolitical after the earthquake, as the Arab states unite against Israel and the Israeli prime minister calls on all Jewish men to come home. It’s not that the conflict isn’t potent or that Foer doesn’t understand its awful ironies; “There was absolutely nothing,” he observes about the Iranian ayatollah, “to distinguish his face from that of a Jew.” Still the tension is diffused by two concluding sections that take place well after the main part of the action, undermining the sense of impending apocalypse on which the novel relies. In the end, we are left to wonder what the stakes are—or more accurately, where the real connections reside. “What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?” asks the rabbi at Jacob’s grandfather’s funeral. The answer—“Maybe like laughing”—is both fulfilling and unfulfilling, much like this ambitious, if not entirely satisfying, book.
Sharply observed but perhaps a bit too sprawling, Foer's novel bites off more than it can chew.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-28002-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
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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