This exploration of the damage fathers can do to sons, and sons to fathers, is more Woodrell than Palahniuk, more hillbilly...
Whitmer (Pike, 2010, etc.) offers dark literary fiction delving into incalculable loss mirrored by the vagaries of father-son relationships.
Physician error killed Patterson Well’s son, a boy he loved beyond words. Refusing to let his memory die, Patterson writes his son letters, uncensored and pain-filled. He grief-counsels himself with alcohol, pain pills and the dangerous work of clearing disaster debris, amid crews so rough and places so perilous he’s never without his father’s Model 1911 Colt pistol. Symbolic that, for Patterson’s father self-medicated his own post-Vietnam PTSD in alcoholic parallel. Now Patterson’s driving home to Colorado, stopping near St. Louis to meet a co-worker, only to discover him in meth-meltdown. There’s also a woman tied up in the bathtub. He fights his friend, frees the woman, and forgetting no good deed goes unpunished, heads home to an off-the-grid cabin in Colorado’s San Luis Valley among wild horses, aspen and Brother Joe, a conspiracy-spouting radio personality. Nearby lives Henry, a broken-down ex–rodeo rider, whose son, Junior, is a sociopathic drug courier. To keep Henry safe, Patterson confronts Junior only to find himself involved in more than one of Junior’s violent capers—"Chase sinks his teeth into Patterson’s forearm. He wraps his arm around Patterson and gnaws." Peripheral characters are superb, especially Laney, Patterson’s former wife, whose love cannot salve Patterson’s rage, and intellectual Vincente and colossal Eduard, Denver drug dealers. With realistic gunplay matching any ol’ Western shoot'em-up, Whitmer’s deft descriptions of biker bars, greasy spoons and mean streets are as spot-on as his clear, clean appreciation of the high country where the "peaks...look like earth torn out of the sky."
This exploration of the damage fathers can do to sons, and sons to fathers, is more Woodrell than Palahniuk, more hillbilly noir than existentialist nihilism.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3435-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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