The weirdest possible blend of Kenneth Patchen, Max Apple, and Tom Clancy. Certainly a vision that should be put under close...
A debut collection of nine very odd tales that stretch the bounds of storytelling—in a youthful vision that already seems too big for the britches of the short story.
Almost everything is unusual here. “Teen Sniper” is a miniature cautionary tale/satire about a teenage career sniper’s awkwardness with all things in life not related to sanctioned murder and his personal license to kill; “Your Own Backyard” is about a father who works as a security-guard/angel-of-death at a zoo, attempting to understand his son; and in a sublime second-person treatise on grief, “The Death-Dealing Cassini Satellite,” a boy drives a bus for a women’s cancer support group founded by his now-dead mother. Another slightly futuristic vision is “Trauma Plate,” about a family trying to sustain an idea of family while they operate a mom-and-pop bulletproof-vest rental mart in a strip mall. Johnson’s unique premises, hybrids of realism and allegory, blends of pedestrian, pop, and the bizarre, create unnerving moods. Prepare for zoo murder, airborne intercourse, stunt flying over Louisiana, and a visit to the dark side of the moon. The author is at his best when these premises drive his quirky aesthetic and prose, rather than the other way around. The most evolved of the tales is “The Canadanaut,” a story set in the 1960s that nevertheless feels like science fiction, about a team of Canadian scientists who are working to identify the sympathetic nature of the universe and in the meantime send a French-speaking, masturbating, bobsledding trapper on a moonshot. It’s the sad abandon of these stories that makes them work, a recollection of times when “There’s the boxy loop of youth, a decade that leaves your ears ringing with television and loneliness.”
The weirdest possible blend of Kenneth Patchen, Max Apple, and Tom Clancy. Certainly a vision that should be put under close surveillance.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03072-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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