This is a funny novel whose insights are unfortunately too one-note to be illuminating.
A satire of American race relations and the performance of identity.
Terry (Zero Fade, 2013) tells the story of a nameless punk musician struggling with his own racial identity. After growing up in the mostly white suburbs of Washington, D.C., with his white mom and black father, the narrator moves with his family to a black community in Richmond, Virginia. The narrator's love of skateboarding, rock music, and his white mother make him feel like an outsider among black people. "I felt excluded from blackness," he recalls, "and like it was my fault that I couldn't fix it." His insecurities manifest in Lucius, a psychic projection of his self-consciousness that takes the form of a street-wise black man who takes it upon himself to teach our narrator how to be black. He gives the narrator his Black Card, which "entitles the brotha or sista who bears it to all black privileges, including but not limited to: Use of the n-word...and, most important, a healthy skepticism of white folks." It's proof that the narrator is really black—but it requires that the holder's authenticity be evaluated periodically. When a white friend's dad uses the n-word and the narrator says nothing in response, Lucius confiscates his Black Card for dereliction of duty. Our punk performs a series of stunts—like performing Run DMC to a roomful of white country music fans who are a bit too enthusiastic—to reclaim his blackness. Meanwhile, he develops a crush on his black co-worker Mona, with whom he can have less rigid conversations about blackness than those he has with Lucius. "There isn't one way to be black," she advises our narrator. But when he becomes implicated in a sexual assault, the narrator's freedom is threatened, and he confronts what it really means to be black in America. This is a funny novel with sharp insights into the constructed nature of racial identity. However, the plot is thin, the characters largely uninteresting, and the prose workmanlike. All that's left are the novel's ideas, which Terry repeats so often that they come to seem rather ham-fisted.
This is a funny novel whose insights are unfortunately too one-note to be illuminating.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948226-26-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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