A well-turned and surprising addition to prison literature.
Stories about the subtle indignities and wandering imaginations that shape prison life, written by an inmate.
Debut author Dawkins is an MFA graduate serving a life-without-parole term in a Michigan prison for a 2004 murder. Whatever one makes of the circumstances behind his incarceration, he’s unquestionably a keen observer of the psychological tools inmates use to sustain themselves behind bars. “Every emotion is multiplied,” writes the narrator of “Sunshine,” who suspects a cellmate’s girlfriend lied about her cancer diagnosis to dump him. “Your mind becomes a very clear prism, into which every feeling enters.” To cope, some play at mental illness (“Daytime Drama”), some obsess over their dreams (“The Boy Who Dreamed Too Much”), and some—as in the especially supple “Engulfed”—become serial liars to the point that the lying becomes a personality trait. And the narrator discovers there are consequences to challenging that persona: “Once you become a number, all you are is the words you use. If your words aren’t real, then neither are you.” Dawkins isn’t much interested in the clichéd tales of prison violence, overcrowding, sexual assault, and drug abuse, though such themes occasionally surface. Nor does he dwell much on the reasons for his protagonists’ imprisonment—the narrator of “573543” was caught buying large amounts of ketamine, but his chief flaw is ignorance. For Dawkins, the true defining element of prison life is tedium: too much time to watch TV, to call random numbers collect in hopes of a connection, to jury-rig tattoo guns. And time, above all, to indulge in reveries about life on the outside. Or, barring that, turn prison life strange, like the prisoner who seems to have developed the capacity to make himself disappear. Magical realism? Wishful thinking? Dawkins leave the answer purposefully, poignantly vague.
A well-turned and surprising addition to prison literature.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6229-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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