Resonant with themes of longing and loss, but too self-conscious for its own good.
Poet/memoirist Barnes’ second novel (Finding Caruso, 2003) traces the impact of a young couple’s impetuous decision to seek a new life in Idaho.
Thomas is a scholarship student in medical school, Helen an undergraduate from a wealthy background, but both dream of a simple existence far from Connecticut. So they buy a farm sight-unseen near the tiny town of Fife and head there in September 1960. Helen is heavily pregnant, Thomas has virtually none of the skills required to rebuild the property’s ruined structures, and the already fraught situation deteriorates after the birth of their daughter Elise. New mother Helen is astonished to find herself desperately lonely, missing the privileged family and lifestyle she once disdained. Thomas spends most of his time fishing, and although he loves her passionately, he can’t bring himself to alter in any way the life that makes him happy and her miserable. Unsurprisingly, Helen finds herself attracted to Manny, the parentless local teen living with them and doing most of the farm work. Helen’s accidental drowning when Elise is just a baby closes the novel’s first half, leaving lasting wounds exposed in Part Two. Sixteen-year-old Elise is home-schooled by Manny, who does everything else around the farm as well, while her father maintains a desultory medical practice and a carefully controlled addiction to Dilaudid. Elise falls in with a preacher’s son, becomes immersed in a hysterical, punitive form of fundamentalism, and winds up in a mental institution after starving herself and trying to scratch out her sinful eyes. Barnes’s beautiful prose and tender characterizations, particularly of the Fife residents who succor the desolate protagonists, are increasingly swamped by lurid, plausibility-straining plot developments. We get the point: Everyone here is bereft in some way, longing for love and seeking to fill the void with various, mostly damaging substitutes. By the time another baby is born under dangerous circumstances in the woods, many readers will be exasperated by the too-neat parallels and overly literary insights.
Resonant with themes of longing and loss, but too self-conscious for its own good.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-26895-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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