Not as good as Chang and Eng, then, but not bad at all. Strauss remains one of the most interesting and promising of younger...
There’s ample entertainment value in this rather desperately inventive second historical novel by the author of the highly praised debut tale Chang and Eng (2000).
This time, Strauss’s real-life subject is “Kid McCoy,” the welterweight boxer and confidence man whose duplicitous exploits paradoxically made his name synonymous with authenticity and honesty. His episodic story is told by a garrulous narrator whose identity is withheld until the closing pages (though many readers will surely guess it), and jumps back and forth between 1895, when the spindly Indiana youngster born Virgil Selby first drifts into prizefighting and “flimflammery,” and 1900, the year in which McCoy claims the welterweight title. In the hastily overstuffed final hundred pages, Strauss spells out the consequences of his antihero’s unsavory affiliation with grotesque Chinese con man Johnnie Gold (“a bush-league P.T. Barnum”), enduring obsession with his fiercely independent showgirl ex-wife Susan Fields, comeback bid (after losing his welterweight crown) in a challenge to heavyweight champion Gentleman Jim Corbett, and last-ditch attempt “to remake himself again” via “The Flimflam to End All Flimflams.” A lot of this works, because Strauss possesses a fluid, racy style and a knack for throwing quickly sketched colorful figures into the mix (e.g., veteran pug “Jabbing Jew” Joe Choinsky, H.L. Mencken–like reporter H.H. Measures, even nondescript fighter William York Tindall—who shares his name with an eminent Joyce scholar). President Theodore Roosevelt and Mark Twain make brief appearances, and Strauss’s re-creations of pugilistic spectacles and Tammany Hall political bloodbaths are acutely, amusingly detailed. The problem: too many of the boxing and flimflamming scenes are too similar, to the point of tedious redundancy. Even Strauss’s complex presentation of Selby/McCoy as a compulsive liar with very genuine immortal longings in him isn’t quite enough to make the chaos of colorful parts gel convincingly.
Not as good as Chang and Eng, then, but not bad at all. Strauss remains one of the most interesting and promising of younger American novelists.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94651-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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