An overly clunky attempt to merge earthbound family drama and high-toned artsiness.
A brother and sister reunite in their Maine hometown for a few days of reckoning with their messy pasts, stalled presents, and art films.
Max and Kelly are twins who don’t have much to show for themselves as they exit their 20s. Kelly dropped out of college in Arizona and can’t hold a steady job, while Max's biggest accomplishments are an unfinished film, The Glazen Shelves, and an obsession with its lead actress, who's gone missing. Kelly has returned to Portland because she has a line on her absent father, who might be able to assist her financially, but Max is disinclined to help—he’s more fixated on the city’s festival celebrating Land Without Water, a high-atmosphere, critically acclaimed film that was made in Portland. Perhaps that film’s female lead, in town for the festival, can help Max center himself? These siblings are a troubled pair and, in Rybeck’s hands, less cohesive and engaging than they have the potential to be. Max is meant to be socially inept, but at times comes off as borderline sociopathic, between incidents that involve near-kidnapping and public nudity. And Kelly, supposedly the centering figure, largely mopes through the proceedings. Such flaws, combined with some plodding prose and clumsy figurative language—“her skin looks stitched together from money” is an odd way to say somebody appears wealthy—make this novel feels as unfinished as Max’s magnum opus. That’s unfortunate, because Rybeck is an interesting thinker about movies, and the back and forths about film have the nerdy enthusiasm of a Criterion Collection commentary. The novel takes its title from a theory Max got from his mother about how a great movie feels “like the director was stranded on an island and starving and lonely and that cinema was the only way of escape.” It’s a nice concept for the nature of creative inspiration. But execution matters too.
An overly clunky attempt to merge earthbound family drama and high-toned artsiness.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-70-5
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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