Such blemishes aside, though: an always-interesting novel of opinions fashioned more to goad than move its readers.
New York Times columnist Akst, in a news-smart and doggedly workmanlike second novel (St. Burl’s Obituary, not reviewed), limns an entire country’s Reagan-era fall from grace, all starting with the spanking of a preschool child.
Webster is the medium-sized northeastern hometown where Terry Mathers, a stutterer still at 40 and former New York City journalist, has returned with his lawyer wife, Abigail, to buy and run the local paper. But the marriage is rocky (Terry has moved out, though their sex is hotter); the Webster Chronicle is losing money; and the couple can’t pay back their loan from Terry’s father, a highly visible national news host who delivers “bite-sized sermons from the pulpit of television.” News of a spanking at Webster’s revered Alphabet Soup preschool is quickly compounded by the children’s testimony that the owners indulged not only in sexual abuse but satanic practices. As accusations and indictments fly, the town (and, later, all of America) verges on something like a nervous breakdown. Selling the story to the public is irresistible, of course, and while Terry struggles with the ethics of taking sides in the newspaper (and falls in love with the county’s child sex-abuse specialist, Diana Shirley), Abigail is sleeping with her advertisers and his father is stealing the biggest story of Terry’s career from under him. Akst, whose tale moves swiftly and in alternating points of view, knows (in the manner of Colin Harrison) his characters’ opinions in everything from politics to sex positions to preschool. Yet he often simplifies his people for the sake of tidy political points (the rich are greedy, TV personalities shallow, mothers with small children dull, with bad hair cuts), and his ending becomes a predictably cynical statement on America’s silliness.
Such blemishes aside, though: an always-interesting novel of opinions fashioned more to goad than move its readers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14812-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: BlueHen/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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