An evocative, artful reimagining of the madness of an ancient hero.
Classicist and poet Carson produces a scrapbooklike rendering of a lesser-known Greek tragedy.
In Herakles, staged in 416 B.C.E., Euripides imagined the demigod returning home to Thebes to find his household under assault by usurper Lykos, who is bent on eliminating the royal house of Amphitryon. As with all tragedies, much of the context is provided by a chorus—here, of old men who, though wise, can’t do much about the situation. With a collagelike text incorporating drawings and sketches, some with splashes of color, Carson works a few plot points of the original, which contains about 1,425 lines as against Carson’s few score. It’s modernized, too; Amphitryon lives in an Airstream, driven from his palace by a “totalitarian cracker.” (It’s not hard to imagine whom Carson might have been thinking of there.) Although they have taken refuge at an altar, Lykos is so irreligious as to plan to burn out Amphitryon, Herakles’ wife, and their kids, “obliged to close our lids / before we’d like.” The chorus invokes V.I. Lenin and the dictatorship of the proletariat, while Lykos, entering with his goon squad, allows that he’s “a basically / outcomes-oriented guy.” When Herakles—H of H, that is, whose name is explained—arrives, he plangently recalls the labors he’s been set to do, again drawing on Bolshevik history and throwing in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park for good measure. Naturally, tragic things ensue; after a spasm of divinely induced madness that causes Herakles to distribute death a little more broadly than he might have wished, all he can say is “Alas” and long for death. Leave it to Theseus, his demidivine pal, to keep him on point: “What could be more useless than you limping offstage to die in a dead language?” Carson’s anachronisms, like those of Christopher Logue, are jarring but suggestive, and the language often attains a nobility worthy of the original tragedians, as when the chorus sings, “We go in tears. / So many swift and dirty years.”
An evocative, artful reimagining of the madness of an ancient hero.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8112-3123-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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