A lightly told but incomplete story.
An orphaned child searches for love in New York City in this debut novel by a writer and comedian.
In the early 1930s, an actress gives birth to a son between acts of These Dreams We Cherish in the Scarsenguard Theater and promptly abandons him after the show. The infant is discovered by the laundress, Eugenia Butler, who hides him backstage and becomes something of a surrogate mother, though she only cares for him while she's at work and gives him champagne as his first food. “That the boy survived his infancy was perhaps the greatest miracle in his miraculous life,” we're told. Indeed. After almost a year, Miss Butler names the boy August March, and the child remains unknown to all the theater's inhabitants except one actor, Sir Reginald Percyfoot. In 1945, August is left to survive on his own after Miss Butler dies, Percyfoot refuses to take him in, and the Scarsenguard is demolished to make way for a hotel; he becomes a street thief to survive. He is finally located by Percyfoot, who tells him he's inherited Miss Butler’s five-story brownstone (which raises the question of why she was willing share her home after her death but not in life), but then Percyfoot promptly sends the never-schooled August off to boarding school. Though August offers rich soliloquies, having grown up seeing all manner of plays, he has difficulty adapting to the expectations of formal schooling, though he thrives when offered a chance to direct the school’s plays. August still lacks purpose or family, however, and after graduation, he returns to running cons with the help of a girl he’s fallen in love with, who is only dimly capable of returning his affections. If you can suspend your disbelief long enough to buy the book's setup, the characters' lack of interiority and weak or absent motives make it difficult to engage with the story, which seems to exist in a slightly alternate world but one strangely without charm. One of three things often keep a reader interested in a book: its world, characters, or ideas. Though Jackson's prose is nimble and clever, his novel can't quite decide what it's interested in, so neither can we.
A lightly told but incomplete story.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293938-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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