The events get lost in the telling. Though the book is full of piquant details, juicy language, and the totally believable...
Hoyt’s debut novel (following a collection of stories, Then We Saw the Flames, 2009) is an unconventional whodunit in which who did it is not the point.
Nineteen-year old Neptune is at the nexus of many different storylines. He's a thorn in the side of the local Black Block, an anarchist commune whose dynamite he has made off with; a late-night knight in shining armor for his mentally ill former professor, Marilynne, whose life he cannot save; a link to the past for the mysterious Saskia, whose dead brother’s shaman-hexed Ghost Machine (a Walkman circa the 1990s) has started spinning the tape of Neptune’s life and cannot be muted or turned off. Adrift, multiply abandoned, alcoholic, and emotionally scarred, Neptune has a tough, wry, and at times movingly vulnerable voice which guides us through the underbelly of anarchic/punk Lawrence, Kansas, as he runs from the anarchists, the police, his past—both recent and way-back-when—and, most of all, his future. Will Neptune evade the anarchists, intent on either recovering their dynamite or enacting their revenge? Will he successfully overcome the minefield of his own personality to work things out with Saskia—who is beautiful, brainy, patient, penitent, and has many other Manic Pixie Dream Girl traits beside—and, most important of all, will he find out who killed Marilynne? Will he tell us if he does? Told in an unending string of first chapters, Hoyt's book beguiles even as it actively befuddles. Ultimately, though Neptune’s hapless violence, his psychic damage, his deep attachment to equally damaged literary lost boys like Holden Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn are both engaging and sympathetic, his insistence on refusing to tell the reader pertinent parts of his past and his near constant defensive rejection of the reader’s attention are relied on too heavily for the surprisingly slender weight of the plot to withstand.
The events get lost in the telling. Though the book is full of piquant details, juicy language, and the totally believable chaos of characters living on the counterculture fringe, it is outpaced by the restless, relentless energy of its main character’s voice.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945814-34-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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