Some Promised Land. The honey was there, but the milk we brought in with our goats. To people in California, God gives a magnificent coastline, a movie industry, and Beverly Hills. To us He gives:sand. To Cannes He gives a plush film festival. We get the PLO." Who's that talking, you ask? That's none other than the Old Testament's King David, who retells his long Biblical story on his deathbed—with a voice (and a viewpoint) that's part Mel Brooks, part Woody Allen, and all Joseph Heller. King David lies dying, terminally cold, unwarmed even by the lovely virgin Abishag the Shunammite. He still lusts after zaftig wife Bathsheba, who won't accommodate David's lust until he agrees to declare Solomon—a doltish plagiarist—as successor to the crown of Israel. So the miserable old king remembers the whole shmear: from crazy Saul and stupid Goliath to poor, snake-ish Absalom. And Heller has a generous grab-bag of ironic, earthy ideas here: David the psalmist, the career-poet, jealous when his best material is stolen by Solomon; David the Jewish husband, with first-wife Michal as the original J.A.P.; David the aging scion and general. Throughout, in fact, the Biblical original is worked through closely, with impressive stamina and elaboration—and, as a short story or novella, perhaps, the notion would have been pure champagne. . . even if clearly pressed from the grapes of Brooks' 2000-Year-Old-Man routines. Here, however, as in George MacDonald Fraser's swashbuckling parody, The Pyrates (p. 586), the basic gimmicks—the blithely outrageous anachronisms, the double-takes, the raunchy Yiddish/English slang, the varied lampoons on King James Bible phraseology—become dutiful and predictable at big-novel length. Meanwhile, Heller's more interesting character/history/theology inventions (e.g., the David/Bathsheba relationship) remain undeveloped, with the Borscht Belt rhythms too relentless to allow for depth or nuance. And the entire vaudeville enterprise eventually seems wilted, formula-creased. Still, what Heller manages to do with faithful attention to the scriptures of Samuel I and II and Kings is often remarkable. ("The first time I laid eyes on Abigail—I was girded for battle and thirsting for vengeance as I marched along the road to Carmel—my member grew hard as hickory and I sheepishly and modestly veiled it from notice with a folded newspaper.") It's also often shtick-ishly hilarious: "'You said pisseth, didn't you?' 'Pisseth?' "That'th right. You thaid all who pisseth against the wall.' 'I timid pisseth?' I was furious now and answered him with a heat that equaled his own. 'I thaid no thuch thing.' 'Yeth, you did. Athk anyone.'" So, though sometimes only half-amusing and never really persuasive as a serious theological farce (David is waiting for an apology from God), Heller's Biblical free-for-all is sure to win a substantial, curious, browsing-and-sampling audience.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 1984
ISBN: 0684841258
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1984
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
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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