This is the most important book Wallace Stegner has done, and he has been marked as "a comer" ever since his memorable novelette, Remembering Laughter. The title of this novel is symbolic (the search for the promise over the mountain — frustrated dreams of power and wealth and happiness); though the mountain itself — yes, with that incredible name — is background for one brief span of happiness. Bo Mason is a flesh and blood individual; you dislike him, you are disturbed by him, you distrust him — but you feel his magnetism, you accept the inevitability of his hold to the last on those nearest to him, — Elsa, his wife, whose every dream was dimmed; Chet, his eldest son, who inherited his father's weaknesses without his strengths; Bruce, the younger boy, sensitive, too easily hurt, resentful and aware of what his father was doing to them all — but pulled back, right to the bitter, sordid end. It is a story that spans frontiers of what is virtually a contemporary picture, — Minnesota, and the Scandinavian section of good, sober farmers; Dakota, still raw frontier at the turn of the century; Saskatchewan, holding out promise of futures unrealized, and Montana, over the border, when prohibition was a provincial condition in Canada — a temptation of quick money to Bo Mason; Utah, which held them longest, though not many months in any one house; Nevada, where gambling was virtually indigenous and Bo briefly "in the money". The period brings the Masons up to the depression — when Bo eventually took the one way out, leaving his sole survivor, Bruce, with a legacy of bitter memories, and a few highlights, and some roots he'd been able to put down for himself despite the arguments of fate. It is not pleasant reading, much of it; but it is real, it is vigorous, it has moments of twisted humor, moments of tenderness, moments of beauty; and it has a holding quality that carries one through its more than 700 pages. It is one of the important novels of the Fall season.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1943
ISBN: 0143105787
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Duell, Sloan & Pearce
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1943
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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