THE OBITUARY WRITER

Name: THE OBITUARY WRITER
Author: Porter Shreve
ISBN: 0-395-98132-8

by Porter Shreve ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2000

A quietly competent tale, with a few surprises, gentle humor, and a good feel for the journalist’s milieu, though ultimately...

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When a sexy young widow comes on to him, a naïve cub reporter with big dreams perks up—then finds he’s gotten more than he bargained for, in this soft-spoken, mildly diverting debut from anthology editor Shreve.

Gordie is 22 and trying to fill the big shoes of his father, a famous Chicago journalist who died when Gordie was five. So Gordie starts small, as junior member of the obituary desk at the St. Louis Independent. He’s already put his ambition into practical use by creating a file of obits for not-yet-dead celebrities when a call comes from a local woman whose Irish wolfhound-breeding banker husband has just died. The widow, Alicia, wants a big spread, but when it becomes apparent that she wants much more, Gordie, after laying eyes on her, is only too happy to oblige. Before long the two are cavorting in the bed she once shared with the dearly departed, and, almost as soon, Gordie is helping her sell everything to begin a new life—with him. Meanwhile, his obit file having been discovered and condemned by his publisher, Gordie turns to other possibilities for advancing his career. He visits a late-night crime scene, which proves more ghoulish than gratifying, then, for inspiration, decides to visit Dallas, where his father hit pay dirt so many years before with the Kennedy assassination. He goes there also to check up on Alicia’s past, since seeds of doubt about her have been planted by her dead husband’s sister, and what Gordie finds gives him much food for thought. Back in St. Louis, Alicia, for all her sexiness, is becoming increasingly unstable, and Gordie has to resort to extreme measures to extricate himself—generating in the process the story of a lifetime.

A quietly competent tale, with a few surprises, gentle humor, and a good feel for the journalist’s milieu, though ultimately with nothing to make it more than adequate in its telling.

Pub Date: June 7, 2000

ISBN: 0-395-98132-8

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN THE WHITE HOUSE WAS OURS
by Porter Shreve

- BOOK REVIEW
DRIVES LIKE A DREAM
by Porter Shreve

- BOOK REVIEW
OUTSIDE THE LAW
edited by Susan Richards Shreve & Porter Shreve

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.