In The Living End, Elkin offered a caustic, hilarious, haunting triptych on the themes of mortality, life-after-death, and God's unabashed injustice. In one of the strongest episodes of the uneven George Mills, he made the process of dying—a terminally ill woman's journey to a Mexican laetrile clinic—into a raucous yet tender black-comedy. But, while the subject-matter here—seven terminally ill English children on an expedition to Disney World—might therefore seem both natural and promising, this is Elkin's weakest novel thus far, with strain and self-consciousness on constant display from beginning (that cumbersome title) to end (an embarrassing finale). The "dream holiday" expedition is the brain-child of Eddy Bale, whose own son Liam died—amid monstrous publicity—from a grisly childhood illness. Eddy raises the money from the British public, starting off with a very small loan from Elizabeth II. (Does she want the fifty quid back? "'Does the pope shit in the woods?' asked the Queen of England.") He chooses the staff for the trip: a manically anti-Semitic doctor; an ex-Royal nanny of warped sexuality; a gay male nurse; and quasi-nurse Mary Cottle, a scarred veteran of aborted loves and pregnancies who has turned exclusively to masturbation. Then the lucky kiddies are selected, ages eight to fifteen, each a pathetic (if unlovable) grotesque: blue-skinned, shrivelled up, deformed by tumors, or drenched in mucus, wheelchaired or crippled, silent or obnoxiously noisy—like Benny Maxine. ("I've got this yid disease. Gaucher's, it's called. I've got this big yid liver, this hulking hebe spleen. I've got this misshapen face and this big bloated belly.") And the trip, as you might expect, is more grim than glorious—though, while the adults pursue their dank/farcical obsessions, the children do find a few fleeting pleasures: spending money; skinny-dipping; spying on Miss Cottle's masturbation sessions; and watching the everyday grotesques—old people—parade by. (Says nurse Colin: "All that soured flesh, all those bitched and bollixed bodies. You see? You see what you thought you were missing?") Unfortunately, however, though the network of themes here—mortality, grotesquerie, existential injustice, the Holocaust—is full of potential, Elkin seems content to decorate a static, undeveloped tableau with verbal filigree: page-long sentences, six-page-long parenthetical remarks, vaudeville-dialogue, interior monologues, fantasy/dream sequences, pilings-up of words that sometimes recall Joyce Carol Oates in their lax, arbitrary excursions. Furthermore, few of these linguistic sideshows have the verve or comic assurance of prime Elkin—partly because they're often pretentious or heavyhanded, partly because the British characters can't benefit from Elkin's genius for American language (his UK dialects are competent at best), partly because Elkin never finds a clear viewpoint or comic tone for this mishmash of surrealism, farce, and bathos. (At the close, after one of the children dies while being harangued by Mickey Mouse, Eddy and Miss Cottle come together in a procreative, pseudo-Joycean porno-mating—defiantly determined to bring yet another grotesque into the world.) Unfunny and unaffecting, difficult yet unrewarding: a novel seemingly modeled on some of William Gass' most iffy precepts—demonstrating that sometimes language-for-it's-own-sake has the power to kill meaning, interest, and emotion.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 156478259X
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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