The unstoppable White (Anarcho-Hindu, 1995, etc., etc.) offers a —novel— about the depravities of television culture that’s as much idea-collage as plain narrative—a sometimes declamatory but most often brilliant thought-book about the great wasteland. There is a story-premise of sorts, slim but full enough of possibilities for White: A man is sunk into a grimy sofa in front of a TV, one daughter walking back and forth in front of him (he doesn—t notice her), another talking nonstop to no one in particular, and a son—later, the book’s narrator—tossing marshmallows into his mouth behind the sofa. —[My] father has been in a cataleptic trance before the T.V. since November of 1963,— he announces, and it’s hard to tell afterward whether this man-boy is caught up more intensely in oedipal rage (—. . . a little boy . . . needs to kill that father himself in order that he may grow up strong and true—) or in a desolation of abandonment and a wish to —find— and get recognition from his father (—Remember, my father had not spoken to me since I was an infant—). Both themes, contradictory or not, are woven into parodies of Combat (—father— is a German bridge to be blown up), Highway Patrol (—People don—t kill, fathers do—), Maverick, Have Gun—Will Travel, and Sea Hunt (—it was I who drove my father away. He hated me—). White’s send-up of Paladin lets him range through great swaths of hyperbolic sex, satire, and psychology (—. . . patricide. Yes, one day Hey Boy and I will take our revenge—), while elsewhere the ruinously depressing banality of the TV culture (of —life-on-T.V.—) is touched on in ominous and recurrent brush- strokes——The outside has disappeared. See there, nothing in the distance but a flat buzzing,— or —my father was in his recliner, aimed toward the T.V. . . . — Intellectual pyrotechnics about America, mass audiences, and the emptiness inside.
Pub Date: June 21, 1998
ISBN: 1-56478-189-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.
The brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising becomes the connective tissue between the isolated characters of this emotionally harrowing novel.
In May 1980, student demonstrations ignited a popular uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju. The police and military responded with ruthless violence, and Han (The Vegetarian, 2015) begins her novel in the middle of a disorienting atmosphere of human-inflicted horror. While searching for a friend, a young boy named Dong-ho joins a team of volunteers who look after the bodies of demonstrators who were killed. He keeps a ledger with details on each corpse, pins a number to its chest, and keeps candles lit beside the ones with no family to grieve beside them. The details of this world seep off the page in a series of sickening but precisely composed images. Han’s evocation of savagery and grief is shockingly sensory and visceral but never approximate or unrestrained. Each character’s voice seems to ring in its own space, and though they are all connected by Dong-ho’s experiences in Gwangju, they exist in an uncanny isolation. The novel is divided into seven parts: six acts that each focus on a different character and an epilogue that pulls in the author herself. The parts shift in time from 1980 to 2013 and in point of view, making the reader intimate or complicit to different degrees with the voice of a dead person, a survivor of torture, a mother suffering from regret and memory. Han explores the sprawling trauma of political brutality with impressive nuance and the piercing emotional truth that comes with masterful fiction. In her epilogue she writes, “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.” Her novel is likely to provoke an echo of that moment in its readers.
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90672-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
PROFILES
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
