Messy, confrontational, way too long—and essential reading.
Third volume in Chute’s blistering series about the Settlement, a radical, politically incorrect collective of the disorderly and disaffected in rural Maine.
The Settlement revolves around "Prophet” Gordon St. Onge, who rails against corporations, the media, and the war machine; he also has 19 “wives,” even more guns, and a friendly relationship with several right-wing militias. However, although the novel takes place from 1990 to 2000, the election of Donald Trump has clearly prompted its author to do some thinking about her previous willingness to declare her characters “no-wing." Chute is at pains to have Gordon denounce “Republican bullshit” and “so-called Christians” to his militia buddies, and she’s backed off her previous contempt for middle-class progressives; Settlement residents form a relationship of wary mutual respect with a group of left-wing grassroots organizers. Nonetheless, Gordon’s and his author’s hearts are always with “the poor, meek, dishonored, deformed, disheartened, and displaced,” and Chute makes it brutally clear that until the left gets over its distaste for “redneck[s]” and poor whites who refuse to be manipulated by racists, the same people will keep running the world. (The sexual power of teenage girls is another third-rail topic she fearlessly tackles.) The action here runs parallel to events in The School on Heart’s Content Road (2008) and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves (2014) but spotlights different people from her vast cast of characters. Fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast, newest of the wives, emerges as the leader of the Settlement’s younger generation; their end run around Gordon toward even more radical dissent drives what there is of a plot. A manifesto and a mass rally prompt increasingly menacing government harassment and a warning of more nefarious deeds to come from corporate CEO Bruce Hummer, his conscience apparently pricked by his rapidly growing cancers. A few juicy personal conflicts keep the novel from devolving entirely into a political tract—but then again, Chute’s fierce political vision has always been the most interesting thing about her work.
Messy, confrontational, way too long—and essential reading.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2951-2
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.
A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.
Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.
Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41429-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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