Meticulous and graceful, though some may find the allusions, dense sentences, and sometimes-opaque narrative a touch...
A woman renounces a promising film career to raise two children, their life journeys weaving a gossamer tale of transitions and death.
Isabel Maher Murphy seems on the verge of movie stardom as Hollywood is turning from silent to talking pictures. Her screen test for Louis B. Mayer apparently pleased the “suits” of that time at M-G-M, but Archer chooses to walk off the set and return to her home in Rhode Island and marriage to an enterprising insurance salesman who could have walked off the streets of Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith. Like Garbo, Isabel, now Bel, never fully articulates her reasons for leaving Hollywood. Nor does author Howard offer full explanations in this third installment of a planned four-novel series (Big as Life, 2001; A Lover’s Almanac, 1998). Rather, with some sense of mystery, she spins out Bel’s life story, and the life stories of her daughter, Rita; her son, Joe, a Jesuit priest; and of a curious, young neighbor, Gemma Riccardi. Like silent film itself, the tales are told from alternating points of view (not always meaningfully “edited” together) and are highlighted by haunting, powerful images. Joe’s mission leads him to the violence of El Salvador, while chubby Rita faces the violence of the Mob through her marriage to a gangster. Gemma, a photographer seeking to imprint on her work a singular style, petitions Bel with questions: Why did she leave Hollywood? Was raising a family in a small coastal town more rewarding than acting? Bel’s answers appear encoded in moments she shares with her children, as when she delights in the role of a declaiming guide during their visit to a Melville museum. Bel’s life—and the lives of her children, reaching melancholy ends—unreel in what may have been her favorite film.
Meticulous and graceful, though some may find the allusions, dense sentences, and sometimes-opaque narrative a touch rarefied.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03358-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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