The best of Gray’s stories find that balance between devastation and humor and navigate an uneasy territory with agility; in...
The minute details of life are memorably rendered in surreal and sometimes grotesque ways.
Many of the stories in this collection are set in a formerly familiar corner of the world that’s been turned on its head. “It was my idea to rent the girl,” writes the narrator of “House Heart,” and the story that follows takes familiar elements and pushes them toward an eerie, transgressive place. A couple living in a space that was once "the preparation wing of a garment factory" rents a young woman for a game called House Heart, in which the threat of violence looms and the industrial remains of the residence become hiding spaces. This is Gray’s fourth book (and third story collection), and it features the widest stylistic range of any of her books to date. Its predecessor, the novel Threats (2012), blended surreal imagery with questions of crime, violence and perception. Here, Gray combines those aspects of Threats with the concise and sometimes-absurdist tendencies that characterized her earlier collections. The irreverent “Go for It and Raise Hell” is metafiction walking into a bar for an unheard-of bender, while “Year of the Snake” begins as a riff on folk tales and shifts gears into something stranger, laced with body horror. There’s also a grim, bittersweet comedy that comes to the forefront in stories such as “Device,” in which a scientist creates a device that predicts the future; after two decidedly specific predictions, the inventor asks it what his future spouse will be like. “ ‘Skin, hair.’ The device buzzed lightly. ‘Fingernails.’ ” The response is both comic, with the machine eventually enveloped in a fit of pastoral reverie, and emotionally harrowing.
The best of Gray’s stories find that balance between devastation and humor and navigate an uneasy territory with agility; in this book, there are many that reach that mark.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-17544-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
PROFILES
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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