Good intentions, but that’s about it.
An exploration of homelessness by the author of Perfect Peace (2010) and The Sacred Place (2007).
Black has said that he wants to “write literature which celebrates the African American presence in America and teaches the world how to be more human.” That this is a laudable goal is obvious to anyone who understands the chronic underrepresentation of minority voices in American letters. And it’s hard to fault someone whose aim as a novelist is to foster empathy. But a worthy objective doesn’t necessarily make for compelling fiction, and this novel is entirely overwhelmed by Black’s mission. Protagonist Lazarus Love III leaves a comfortable life—as well as a wife and two children—to pursue a more authentic existence as a man unencumbered by material desires. He creates a new family with people whose homelessness is involuntary, individuals with sad and difficult histories who are drawn to Lazarus’ charisma and pride. And then a woman they call The Comforter joins their fragile community, speaking of trials to come. Her words prove true when Lazarus is accused of murder. Each member of his tribe works to prove him innocent even though it means revisiting pasts they had hoped to leave behind. In terms of style, Black has created here a kind of fleshed-out symbolic mode, a mixture of realism and allegory that succeeds as neither. Characterization is both flat and overly detailed—lots of exposition but no real depth. Lazarus’ story features a confusing timeline and conflicting descriptions of how he ended up on the street, which makes it difficult to understand him. And a plot built entirely of coincidences might work for a fable or a fairy tale, but it strains credulity here. None of this means, however, that there is no audience for this novel. Readers who look for uplift and inspiration in their fiction will find both here.
Good intentions, but that’s about it.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07847-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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