Perfectly fine in execution but also a bit tiresome; with a different conception in the central story, Hadley’s consummate...
A sorrowful debut follows a family and some friends as they go stage by stage through dissatisfaction with their lives.
In a rainy modern-day British setting, a 29-year-old mother of three by the name of Clare is dreading the arrival of her childhood best friend Helly and Helly’s most recent boyfriend, David, for a visit at her cramped home—thus Hadley’s tale, with its ennui, depressed interior monologue, and passive-aggressive struggles for power, starts off like a well-executed if overly familiar short story. Fortunately, it soon takes a turn toward somewhat greater interest, as the author takes a step back from Clare’s problem and comes at the story from the point of view of Clare’s son, Toby, then back to Clare, then Clare’s mother, Marian, and so on. Even as she lures the reader into her other characters’ skins and worries, she keeps coming back to Clare and the story’s central, thorny issue: that Clare wants to have an affair with David. Her husband, Bram, is a scientist who studies the ecology of local mudflats, while David is a handsome Londoner who worked as a lighting technician for concerts and clubs. As much as Clare hates to admit it, she’s jealous of Helly—an aspiring actress and now well-paid model—and wants to taste at least a little of her glamorous life. Unfortunately for the story, though, this dilemma never quite makes itself dramatically believable or as a result compelling, a difficultly not helped by Hadley’s point-of-view-switching technique; after she’s taken the reader off to explore characters like the morose Toby, dealing with his slacker mother, or mousy Marian, taking care of her domineering academic father, being required to return to Clare’s interior life seems a chore. If only she were the most interesting.
Perfectly fine in execution but also a bit tiresome; with a different conception in the central story, Hadley’s consummate knowledge of her characters might have resulted in a more telling debut.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-7064-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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