Downing sets the town-and-gown scenery well, but there’s an irony in a hero advocating for active writing in such a static...
A creative writing professor soldiers through a semester, uncertain of his own capacity to write or teach.
This sequel to Downing’s 1997 novel, Perfect Agreement, revisits Mark, a teacher at a Massachusetts college who guides a clutch of undergrads through the essentials of point of view, style, and metaphor. But he lacks much in the way of authority or even assertiveness. He cedes much of the control of the writing workshop to an unnamed professor with whom he co-teaches it, feels listless at home (his partner is working overseas), and is growing weary of both academic bureaucracy (he’s procrastinating on writing an assigned memo for a committee he serves on) and intramural tensions (the adjuncts are organizing). All of this lassitude gives the novel a distinct lack of body heat, especially in the early chapters, where much of the narrative excitement comes from the peculiarities of Mark's writing exercises: Write a scene using only one-syllable words, write about a car crash that kills a person, etc. Eventually the book snaps into the seriocomic groove that the campus novel typically demands, from Mark’s struggle to complete his own assignments to his hailing an Uber that turns out to be driven by one of the college’s ill-paid adjuncts. Some late-breaking plot twists, involving an ailing student and the professor’s true identity, shed some light on Mark’s disconnection from himself. But the prevailing mood is ambivalence: “You could call this fear of success or fear of failure. You could say that Mark was embarrassed by his ambitions or unequal to them.” That kind of wheel-spinning drains the action from the story. And as any writing teacher will tell you, the success of a story rests on the action that its central character brings to it.
Downing sets the town-and-gown scenery well, but there’s an irony in a hero advocating for active writing in such a static environment.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-147-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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