A clumsily written novel about grief, guilt, and redemption that somehow achieves emotional dullness, paying lip service to...
A father finds himself drawn into the mystery of his sons’ disappearance after more than a decade of grieving their loss.
Hugh Mcpherson is a middle-aged man who lives in Los Angeles, assembling a quiet and mild-mannered life that conceals a reality-warping capacity for grief, guilt, and futile wallowing. Twelve years earlier, he left his 11-year-old twin sons surfing, challenging waves while he cheated on his wife. When he returned from the tryst, his sons had vanished, presumed drowned. Hugh’s wife, a Japanese woman whose father happens to be a famous author, left him to sink into despair. Now, Hugh returns to the beach and attempts to drown himself, setting off a sequence of events that makes him reconsider the strange elements of his sons’ disappearance and conveniently coincides with his ex-father-in-law’s visit to Los Angeles to finish a novel that bears a heavy-handed similarity to Hugh’s life. Nothing about this novel, or the novel within the novel—which appears in excerpts from the famous writer’s draft in progress—is subtle. Austin seems to aspire to the trappings of something by Haruki Murakami or William Gibson, incorporating surreal visions and a shadowy corporation that specializes in confusing reality, but he lacks the grace and force of imagination to shape them into a compelling story. The elements of Japanese culture come across as self-absorbed fantasies or assumptions. The writing itself is ponderous to the point of unintended comedy. A man’s bare chest is described as porpoise sleek, except for “bouquets of hair at his nipples.”
A clumsily written novel about grief, guilt, and redemption that somehow achieves emotional dullness, paying lip service to feeling without generating its own.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-409-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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