Powerful and disturbing, though not always coherent.
The larger audience attracted by the award-winning adaptation of the author’s debut novel (Push, 1996, adapted into the film Precious) will recognize this sequel as "Son of Precious."
A poet and teacher, Sapphire created a literary sensation with the publication of Push. Yet that novel had even greater impact more than a decade later as the source material for Precious, the success of which might well have spawned this longer, more ambitious follow-up. Readers might remember the birth of a son in that novel, the second baby for the precocious teenager who was repeatedly raped by her father. The boy mainly existed in the margins of Push, and this is his story, one of adolescent turbulence and shifting identities, from a narrator who has difficulty distinguishing his dream life from the shifting realities of his existence. And so will readers. Those hoping for more of Precious will be disappointed to learn that the novel opens with mention of her funeral, as the narrator quickly finds himself shunted from one of his mother’s friends to a foster home to a Catholic orphanage, from which he is delivered to his great-grandmother (who delivers an impassioned soliloquy on her migration from Mississippi to New York) after the discovery of a bureaucratic foul-up. Various names accompany his abrupt changes of address, with “Abdul,” “Crazy Horse” and “J.J.” among the labels attached to a boy who at 13 could pass for an adult. His sexuality is equally ambiguous; though he doesn’t think of himself as gay, he finds himself prey for older men and develops an appetite for smaller boys. He’s also smart, articulate and a gifted dancer, as he moves from the patronage of a dance teacher (who takes sexual or at least emotional advantage) to an experimental company where both his sexuality and hold on reality are challenged. The author plainly embraces an aesthetic she ascribes to a dance piece—“It’s controlled where it needs to be and wild and free where it can be”—though the novel might benefit from a little more of the former at the expense of the latter.
Powerful and disturbing, though not always coherent.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59420-304-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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