An offbeat tale of freedom and duty in a rural totalitarian society.
A dystopian thriller set in a community that has as much in common with Winter’s Bone as The Hunger Games.
In this debut novel, Nelson tells the story of a walled community in a vaguely Appalachian setting, where “Sentinels” protect the settlement against “Outlanders,” adolescents are “Chosen” for careers, and art is forbidden as a distraction from civic obligations. The unnamed protagonist directs his narration to an unnamed friend (“First time I actually seen your place. Even though I helped you build it”) whom he’s just buried. When authorities have questions about the narrator’s behavior, he’s sent to develop an abandoned orchard on the outskirts of the settlement. He’s also given responsibility for Mirabelle, the young daughter of his friend and an Outlander woman. Through flashbacks, the narrator reveals how his friend challenged the community’s norms and the events that led to his own exile. Ultimately, the narrator must decide how committed he is to enforcing those norms and defeating the Outlanders, and how flexible his standards are in the service of the community. Nelson takes a different approach to common dystopian tropes, such as rebellion and control. The book draws its world in detail, down to a technique for building a roof in violation of official standards, but the narrator’s focus is domestic, and the book doesn’t try to place the walled community within a broader context. However, a conflict over the community’s coal deposits adds a lightly explored environmental aspect to the story. Nelson’s frequent misuse of punctuation in dialogue (“ ‘Want a hand’ he says’ ”) and ellipses (“ ‘It has been...’ snaps his fingers in a circle ‘… one hundred and seven years since the last Outsider Incursion’ ”) can be grating, though, especially when contrasted with the deliberate non-standard grammar of the narrator’s voice (“It ain’t ownership, though, so much as it’s a duty to care”), which helps to establish the rural South setting.
An offbeat tale of freedom and duty in a rural totalitarian society.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5169-2617-6
Page Count: 114
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because...
Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level—in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written.
Palahniuk's insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world—he's a "guerilla terrorist of the service industry." "Project Mayhem" seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers' soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club—a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden's bigger scheme: a supersecret strike group to carry out his wilder ideas. Durden finances his scheme with a soap-making business that secretly steals its main ingredient—the fat sucked from liposuction. Durden's cultlike groups spread like wildfire, his followers recognizable by their open wounds and scars. Seeking oblivion and self-destruction, the leader preaches anarchist fundamentalism: "Losing all hope was freedom," and "Everything is falling apart"—all of which is just his desperate attempt to get God's attention. As the narrator begins to reject Durden's revolution, he starts to realize that the legendary lunatic is just himself, or the part of himself that takes over when he falls asleep. Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs.
This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because it's so compelling.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03976-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
BOOK TO SCREEN
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