A tragic yet hopeful novel, as ghost-haunted as Appalachia itself.
Nielsen and Robbins, an Appalachian coal miner’s son, tell the fictionalized story of a father’s faith and struggle in this debut novel.
There’s more to coal miner Oakley Grace—known to many as Mournful—than meets the eye. He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, given to having visions of the future. He’s also “probably the most famous funeralizing preacher in Harlan County, Kentucky,” according to his deceased 10-year-old daughter Bud, who narrates Mournful’s story from the wrong side of death’s door. It’s the Great Depression, and mining is difficult, dangerous, exhausting work; after the company deducts “rent, fuel coal, doctor’s fees and scrip advances for groceries,” miners were paid “only a few pennies, or nothing at all.” When union talk starts up in Harlan County, the mine operators—who also own the police and the local doctor—clamp down hard, and Mournful has an enemy in his former boyhood friend Cork Markham, the son of the mine superintendent. This engaging story—first scribbled “on notebook pages, old receipts and backs of envelopes” by Robbins and shaped into a novel by Nielsen—is anchored in authentic language, description and characters. Appalachia’s natural beauty, tragic history and culture, as appealingly presented here, may be familiar from “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (the song, book and film) and the Oscar-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA, among other sources. The novel effectively portrays elements that readers might expect, such as moonshiners, mine collapses and tent revivals, and the characters speak in a folksy, if somewhat repetitive, diction. Even in the novel’s lightest moments, a keen awareness of death seems ever-present. Bud’s Grandma Cora, for example, is so fiercely independent that she spends four months digging her own grave with “a soup spoon from the kitchen” so she could “look out yonder and see her handiwork and know, even in this last thing, she didn’t need anyone.”
A tragic yet hopeful novel, as ghost-haunted as Appalachia itself.Pub Date: March 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480229235
Page Count: 256
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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