This deservedly popular writer takes risks that most of her contemporaries wouldn’t touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole....
A complex web of human and natural struggle and interdependency is analyzed with an invigorating mixture of intelligence and warmth.
In a vividly detailed Appalachian setting, several seemingly incompatible lives come into initially troubling proximity during one event-filled summer. Wildlife biologist Deanna Wolfe has returned to her home territory to work at “trail maintenance” on lushly forested Zebulon Mountain, where a sighting of coyotes (not native to the area) excites her interest in “the return of a significant canid predator and the reordering of species it might bring about.” Deanna’s stewardship of this wilderness is compromised by her affair with “seasonal migrant” Eddie Bondo, whose pragmatic hunter’s code challenges her determination to preserve nature red in tooth and claw. Their relationship, explored in chapters (ironically) entitled “Predators,” is juxtaposed with the stories (“Moth Love”) of former “bug scientist” and committed environmentalist Lusa Landowski, a widowed farm woman at odds with her late husband’s judgmental (tobacco-growing) family, and feuding next-door neighbors Garnett Walker and Nannie Rawley (“Old Chestnuts”), whose contention arises when the herbicides employed to save his chestnut trees endanger her apple orchard. All of the aforementioned are interesting, complicated, ornery creatures themselves, and Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible, 19xx, etc.) has the good sense to present them in extended conversations (and arguments). The dialogue virtually leaps off the page as the various parties learn a great deal about one another—and themselves. The trap this ambitious story has laid for itself—an overabundance of discussion of ecological issues—is to a great extent avoided because its people’s causes are shown to have developed credibly from their personal histories and present circumstances. Kingsolver doesn’t hesitate to lecture us, but her lessons are couched in a context of felt life so thick with recognition and implication that we willingly absorb them.
This deservedly popular writer takes risks that most of her contemporaries wouldn’t touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole. Prodigal Summer is another triumphant vindication of her very distinctive art.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019965-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
IN THE NEWS
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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