Entertaining in places but unsatisfying overall.
A love story with a metafictional wrapper and more puns than Rapunzel had hairs on her head.
On a commuter train chugging through New Jersey, a book editor named John tells of how he is buttonholed by a fellow named Katz and agrees to listen to him recite a novel by his brother, also known as Katz, whenever their rides coincide. The story of the internal novel concerns an affair between a casually observant Jew also named Katz and a Christian woman named Maria who meet as they wait for a commuter trolley to Boston. They progress quickly to intimacy via their shared intelligence, sensuality, and fondness for wordplay. But Maria is “slowly filling with guilt,” until she eventually takes a vow of chastity. It’s a distressing development for Katz. But which one? The Katz who is the protagonist of the novel within the novel and has a brother named Katz in that underlying fiction, or the Katz who is the author of the NWTN, or his brother, Katz, the reciter of the NWTN within the novel. Having fun yet? Leviant (Kafka’s Son, 2016, etc.) certainly is. He alludes to his own previous books and to a novelist named C.L. Eviant, and he never met a bad pun he didn’t use: “Whodunnit? Hedon it. Hedonist. I’m a hedonist. But she, she wasn’t a shedonist.” Readers may enjoy the verbal silliness and meta-mischief but feel shortchanged on substance. Leviant’s characters often feel like pawns for his playfulness even when things turn serious—if not sacrilegious—in matters of faith. The anatomy of the affair is almost devoid of real tension, especially as it must frequently yield to the metafictional hijinks, which themselves make for annoying echoes as new versions of chapters are introduced and give Leviant a chance to have his Katz and repeat it.
Entertaining in places but unsatisfying overall.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-45-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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