As strange, musical, and carefully calculated as its unusual heroine.
A fast-talking young woman sets out to help her family at the height of Ireland’s recession in this language-driven debut.
From a young age, Gael Foess is a hustler: ambitious, arrogant, and more capable than most adults. After her father walks out, Gael must care for her unusual family on her own. There's her mother, Sive, conductor for Ireland’s National Symphony Orchestra, who struggles with an impenetrable depression and is largely distant toward her children, and Guthrie, Gael’s holier-than-thou younger brother, who suffers seizures from a mental disorder that result in beautiful visions. While Sive and Guthrie each possess artistic genius they don’t know how to spin into comfortable livelihoods, Gael’s true talent lies in convincing unsuspecting strangers to believe the stories she weaves out of air. “The recession made it worse: the false-humility epidemic,” thinks Gael. “But it’s not enough for your relatives to know your worth. For your gifts to be put in a cabinet like ornamental photo frames, destined to tarnish.” Instead, Gael wants her family to shine. She tries first to scam her way into London Business School, then steals her mother’s compositions to solicit interest from orchestras around the world, and finally flies to New York at the height of the Occupy movement to sell a stunning set of Guthrie’s paintings. When a trendy gallery shows interest but requires more paintings to secure a show, Gael hires an artist to forge her brother's work. This is both Gael’s crowning achievement and a move that isolates her from her loved ones. For a novel with a con-artist heroine, Hughes’ debut is oddly quiet and language-focused. Most of the action takes place off-stage or in long passages of dialogue relayed well after the fact. But Hughes delivers a compelling exploration of what it means to create art, skewering the arbitrary restrictions of art-world gatekeepers along the way. At the emotional heart of this book lies a darker question, though: What does it mean to make a performance of your own life, in service of your family, when the cost might be to lose them forever?
As strange, musical, and carefully calculated as its unusual heroine.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6110-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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