Thoughtful, sometimes-exasperating, boundary-pushing fiction.
Fifteen tales of modern anxiety that display Marcus’ range, from angry realism to mind-bending allegory.
Marcus (The Flame Alphabet, 2012, etc.) front-loads his latest collection with four works of unabstracted, relatively frictionless storytelling. “What Have You Done?” tracks a man at a misery-filled family reunion, unable to address what’s estranged him (a sex crime is implied) but unable to explain his rehabilitation either. In “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a writing teacher’s gig on a cruise ship only underscores his sourness. And “The Dark Arts” and “Rollingwood” deal with men at awful turning points, one being treated for a blood disorder in a German facility, the other raising a toddler while his estranged wife is absent and his job collapses. All dour themes explored by dour men, but Marcus has mastered a bitterly comic tone and a level of psychological insight that make the characters more than repositories of middle-age rage. The remaining stories play more freely with tone and structure, with varying degrees of success. “The Loyalty Protocol,” which focuses on a community that responds to an unnamed apocalyptic shift with constant drills and brutal exclusionary tactics, evokes the chilling tone of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” But in stories like “The Father Costume,” in which people “speak” in cloth, or “Origins of the Family,” where bones are society’s chief construction material, Marcus pushes metaphor to its breaking point, making for sketches that are more intriguing than evocative. He gets to have it both ways, though, in the closing story, “The Moors,” a slow-motion study of a man’s trip to his office’s coffee cart. Its focus on picayune detail and a synapse-firing–by–synapse-firing exploration of the protagonist’s despair suggests Nicholson Baker in a sour mood. But the effect is at once smart, claustrophobic and comic.
Thoughtful, sometimes-exasperating, boundary-pushing fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-37938-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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