A truly representative sampling of this unpredictable author’s grind-it-out strengths and mind-boggling weaknesses.
The lingering residue of survivor’s guilt and trauma shape a battered woman’s life on the run in Oates’s latest novel (Black Girl/White Girl, 2006, etc.), which is stuffed with echoes of her earlier fiction.
Following a terse “Prologue” in which young wife and mother Rebecca Tignor rejects memories of her harsh immigrant father Jacob Schwart, we observe her fending off a stranger who follows her home from her factory job, addressing her as “Hazel Jones,” a name that means nothing to her. Then, in juxtaposed narratives, we learn of her girlhood among a German-American family scarred by the resentment of her father (a teacher and intellectual reduced to working as a cemetery caretaker) and the violence of her older brother, and the life to which she alone escaped after a family tragedy: a hopeful marriage to traveling salesman Niles Tignor, blighted by his violent abuse of Rebecca and their young son “Niley.” Escaping again, Rebecca reinvents herself (as “Hazel Jones,” also renaming Niley “Zacharias”), moves around upstate New York for years and finds love with a decent older man (Chet Gallagher), who also nurtures “Zacharias’s” precocious musical gift—until the pull of her own life brings Rebecca/Hazel to obsession with the nihilistic “wisdom” preached by her doubtless insane father. The arc thus traced virtually repeats that of Oates’s 1967 novel A Garden of Earthly Delights (itself recently republished, in substantially rewritten form), and circumstantial details recall similar material in such novels as The Assassins (1975) and Angel of Light (1981). Furthermore, the novel ends with an exchange of letters which incorporates a short story published in her recent collection High Lonesome (2006). The resulting patchwork is an amalgam of tedious rehashing and compelling drama, whose best feature is Oates’s painstaking portrayal of a woman so persistently exploited and betrayed that she loses all sense of who she actually is.
A truly representative sampling of this unpredictable author’s grind-it-out strengths and mind-boggling weaknesses.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-123682-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
