With Major’s attention to rhythm and the musicality of language, the result is a delightful feast for the senses.
Poet/painter/novelist Major (From Now On: New and Selected Poems 1970-2015, 2015, etc.) gives us a new collection of 23 short stories that explore the full range of the human condition.
“Temporary Business,” the opening tale, concerns itself with the potent drama of two people who have just begun to live together. With her own marriage in crisis, Isa, described as being intelligent, with “a great splash of red hair” and a “musical voice,” has invited herself to stay with Edward, an old friend of her mother’s, and figure out what she wants next. Wading through the undercurrents of sexual tension, Isa and Edward bicker over his eating habits and “make love in the afternoon, lying across the bed, half-dressed.” Major brilliantly hones in on the specific, detailed moments of their lives to articulate the intricacies of character and relationships, like bright swatches of color across a dark canvas. Here is an elegant union of craftsmanship and emotional truth. Further into the collection, Major showcases his ability to use different styles to enhance the telling of a tale. The title story is a Shakespearean monologue of death and family drama set during the hottest days of a Chicago summer, couched in the guise of a single phone call. Of particular note is the frank, matter-of-fact exploration of sexuality that permeates various tales, among them “Gelasia’s Problem,” “Girl in a Boat,” and “Driving Kenneth Home.” Here we have the best of literary fiction: visceral characters and compelling plots. However, the brief length Major favors sometimes precludes a level of reflection that would add depth to each individual piece.
With Major’s attention to rhythm and the musicality of language, the result is a delightful feast for the senses.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9968973-2-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Green Writers Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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