A lovely, lively novel for all its sometimes bitter view of the war between the sexes; impeccably written, and without a...
Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010, etc.) delivers a cross-the-pond rejoinder to Philip Roth in this entertaining, sexually laden picaresque.
Frank Ritz, 50, gets paid for sitting around all day and watching television—literally. A prizewinning critic, he is surrounded by top-drawer media-consumer technology, his study a vision of “winking red and green lights…digitized all-knowingness, like the cabin of a jumbo jet.” The trouble is, his wife is firmly committed to the homespun life—anything to oppose Frank, it seems. Melissa writes what he calls “feministical-erotic novels” longhand; when she’s not doing so, she snipes at him for his choice of profession, even though, Frank fumes, “without his watching that crap all day she couldn’t afford the luxury of writing a hundred words a month.” Frank finds himself thrust outside the door, shed of his cocoon. And what’s a poor boy to do without his TV? Why, start chasing women of every description. “What a mystery girls were,” Frank ponders. “You just never knew what you were going to find. No wonder there were some men who never stopped.” Frank is relentless in his non-stopping, embarking on a sexual odyssey to do Molly Bloom proud, even as Jacobson fills in the background with sad and sordid tales of early misadventures with Scandinavian exchange students and flower children. The arrangements get a little complex at times, including one particularly odd and acrobatic threesome toward the end of the tale, eventually leading Frank more or less full circle. Will he find happiness? We can never quite be sure, but Frank is exuberant in his midlife freedom. Jacobson’s writing perfectly matches that mood, exemplified by a long passage, the literary equivalent of a filmic single-tracking shot, describing a walk along Oxford Street, “eyeballing policemen, postmen, traffic wardens, bus drivers, cab drivers, van drivers, street-sweepers,” and on and on, embracing the whole of humanity.
A lovely, lively novel for all its sometimes bitter view of the war between the sexes; impeccably written, and without a false note.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-687-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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