It rambles, and it’s a downer. But there’s a real kick to it.
Good writing essentially redeems a potentially self-defeating subject in the Scottish author’s absorbing fourth: a first-person chronicle of alcoholism that’s equal parts despairing, funny, and intermittently tiresome.
Protagonist Hannah Luckraft (whose surname vibrates with suggestions of repeated false hopes amid serial wreckage) is a 30ish underachiever who still lives with her frustrated but indulgent parents, loses successive jobs (pointedly, that of sales rep for a cardboard-manufacturing company), has unsatisfying sex with nondescript dominant males, and drinks—Lord, how she drinks. The 14 chapters here doubtless connote the Stations of the Cross (one character refers to them rather obtrusively), but it’s hard to decide whether Hannah is one of those Dostoevsky called the “insulted and injured,” or a detached sardonic observer of her own ruinous flaws (“I am enough to make one miserable. I am too much to bear”). In any case, she keeps right on her way to hell, tormenting her long-suffering mum (a nice crisp characterization) and self-righteous younger brother, and making a mess of a chance for possible happiness with her fellow souse and sometime lover, dentist Robert Gardener. Paradise (the blissful state Hannah seeks in alcohol) is sometimes gloomy and redundant (there are echoes of Jean Rhys and Malcolm Lowry, and a hint of her countryman Alasdair Gray’s far livelier 1982, Janine), more often buoyed by Kennedy’s flinty descriptive skills and bracing black humor. Fortunately, the general malaise is broken up by such beguiling set pieces as Hannah’s residence at a Dickensian rehab clinic and a climactic train journey whose grotesque details suggest a fusion of Hieronymus Bosch and Irvine Welsh. Kennedy (Indelible Acts, 2003, etc.) is a risk-taker, and her fiction often succeeds in inverse proportion to its formal smoothness and symmetry.
It rambles, and it’s a downer. But there’s a real kick to it.Pub Date: March 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4364-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.
The husband-and-wife team who have given us refreshing English versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov now present their lucid translation of Tolstoy's panoramic tale of adultery and society: a masterwork that may well be the greatest realistic novel ever written. It's a beautifully structured fiction, which contrasts the aristocratic world of two prominent families with the ideal utopian one dreamed by earnest Konstantin Levin (a virtual self-portrait). The characters of the enchanting Anna (a descendant of Flaubert's Emma Bovary and Fontane's Effi Briest, and forerunner of countless later literary heroines), the lover (Vronsky) who proves worthy of her indiscretion, her bloodless husband Karenin and ingenuous epicurean brother Stiva, among many others, are quite literally unforgettable. Perhaps the greatest virtue of this splendid translation is the skill with which it distinguishes the accents of Anna's romantic egoism from the spare narrative clarity with which a vast spectrum of Russian life is vividly portrayed.
Pevear's informative introduction and numerous helpful explanatory notes help make this the essential Anna Karenina.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89478-8
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
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