Lucid prose limns complicated people whose dilemmas illuminate crucial moral choices, large and small. Very fine fiction...
From short-story author Packer (Mendocino, 1994), a reflective and probing first novel about a young woman reassessing her life after her fiancé is crippled.
Twenty-three-year-old Carrie is already quietly bored with Mike when he dives off the pier at Clausen’s Reservoir and breaks his neck. Suddenly there are others to contend with—her mother (her father vanished when Carrie was three), her best friend Jamie, Mike’s parents, even Mike’s best friend Rooster. Everyone thinks they know exactly who Carrie is and what she will do. Already, her future was no longer cast in a perfectly comfortable mold, and she’s panicked now as the accident threatens to set it in stone. After going through the motions for a few weeks, refusing to make emotional contact with anyone even as she dutifully visits Mike in the hospital, Carrie jumps into her car and heads to New York City. There, she moves in with a gay friend from high school and quickly embarks on a love affair with Kilroy, an older man who’s everything Mike is not: moody, secretive, distrustful of easy emotions. Carrie sets out to make a new identity for herself: she takes classes in clothing design, befriends a lesbian poet, slowly learns more about Kilroy’s conflicted past. Meanwhile, phone calls home don’t convince anyone she’s coming back: Mike is resigned, Jamie bitterly angry. Few readers, either, will expect her to return again, since Packer has painted such a compelling portrait of her alienation at home and of New York’s liberating pleasures as the city where people reinvent themselves. But this turns out to be a deeper novel than that, as Packer sends Carrie home to make her peace with Mike and Jamie. And there’s not a false note in the story’s tentative resolution, which thwarts our initial expectations in order to satisfy more complex demands.
Lucid prose limns complicated people whose dilemmas illuminate crucial moral choices, large and small. Very fine fiction indeed.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-41282-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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