by Lily Tuck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1999
For her third outing, Tuck (The Woman Who Walked on Water, 1996, etc.) goes to Thailand with a young American couple, both shallow enough to frustrate the reader as much as fulfill the otherwise often witty story they’re a part of. On their wedding night in 1967, James and Claire fly to Bangkok, where James works for JUSMAAG (Joint United States Military Assistance Advisory Group) building airstrips in the jungle at Nakhan Phanom. When he’s away doing this, the highly intelligent but excruciatingly inert Claire tries to busy herself with training the household servants (the young man Prachi must keep leaves out of the swimming pool), reading Thai history, going on tours with other JUSMAAG wives, taking language lessons—and obsessing about what really happened to Jim Thompson, the 61-year-old American silk zillionaire who now, just days after having James and Claire as dinner guests at his palatial house, has disappeared without a trace, said by some to be lost in the jungle, by others to have been snatched by the communists, and thought by Claire herself (though not until story’s end) to have been kidnaped by the Americans themselves for some invidious reason vaguely connected with the growing war next door in Vietnam. As he has from page one, her new husband and egregious male chauvinist pig James denigrates and belittles this and any other ideas that Claire may have’so that her paranoia-cum-truth only festers in her own mental hothouse. Since not much more happens (aside from the event telegraphed by the book’s subtitle—though even why that happens will puzzle the thoughtful), readers are left with little more than exotic atmosphere—which Tuck excels at, as she does also at Third World squalor—and a building sense of the portentous without any final payoff. Deft, incisive, colorful, but by and large a tale only of echoes.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-723-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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by Lily Tuck
by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
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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
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edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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