A talented writer earnestly searching for a story to tell.
Divorced parents are confusing, girls are confusing, bandmates are confusing, living in Kalamazoo is confusing—and so on.
Back before it was marketed as a lifestyle option for overly sensitive poetic teens, “emo” signified an unusually ascetic, self-lacerating brand of punk rock. Vim Sweeney, the hero of this debut novel set in 1992, is a member of that tribe: He’s 17, just out of high school, and plays guitar in a band, the Judy Lumpers, that allows him to vent his anxieties about feeling aimless in the sticks. His home life is cracked but stable—dad’s absent, but his stepfather is a sturdy wage-earner with a ready arsenal of platitudes about the value of hard work. So Vim’s biggest worry is erasing his status as a virgin, though hooking up with Helene, his bandmate’s girlfriend, wasn’t his wisest move. Charles captures this milieu in elegant, poetic and sometimes overly florid language—he has an affinity for long strings of run-on prose that gush about love and fear of the future, though he’ll also knock you back with a taut bit of abstraction. (Complete text of chapter 69: “Time like wave after wave eroding us.”) Charles introduces a host of relatives, scenesters and quirky locals, jumping from noisy punk shows to dull dinners with mom and stepdad at the Olive Garden, and his tone and imagery does an impressive job of capturing the moment when you’re so eager to get out of your adolescence you’re fit to burst. But the storytelling is oddly static, and too often Charles expends his energy fussing over the finery of his prose instead of moving the story forward. Readers born on the cusp of Gens X and Y could use a spokesperson who can do better than crack jokes and make cool band references, and Charles seems eminently qualified for the gig. But he’s not there yet.
A talented writer earnestly searching for a story to tell.Pub Date: June 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-088298-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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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