This autobiographical first novel delights in irreverence and irony—its politically incorrect narrator refuses to sacrifice his much-cultivated individuality for a ready-made racial identity. He's black, blue, and bourgeois—Ellison's Invisible Man getting drunk with Frederick Exley. Fragmented and episodic, Pinckney's daring narrative begins in Indiana ``on the glossy edge of the New Frontier,'' when the young narrator looks into his future among the ``Also Chosen,'' the suburban answer to ``the Talented Tenth'' of well-educated and polite Negroes. But hovering over the rosy scene is Ivy-educated Grandfather Eustace (``the arch darky''), whose failure at everything, including itinerant preaching, presages his unnamed grandson's own will to dissipate. Nerdy and precocious, the adolescent Anglophile discovers ``the social stratification of being a black-power advocate in a suburban high school.'' But his involvement with a Black Panther splinter group (the Heirs of Malcolm) ends with his purge for ``flunkyism.'' A trip to beloved England finds London as depressing as downtown Indianapolis. College days are served on the edge of Harlem (the ``Valley of the Shines''), where Black Muslims and street hustlers mark him as college boy and rube. His only black friend in school is the flamboyant and sexy Bargetta, who dates only whites. After Columbia, our hero slums on Morningside Heights; hangs out in a working-class bar; works for Djuna Barnes as a part-time handyman. He coasts through a job in publishing; moves to Manhattan's Pomander Walk; attends a Farrakhan rally; and suffers through a dinner party with black yuppies. While he halfheartedly tries to make his way in the world, family keeps tugging at his conscience and consciousness—Aunt Clara in ``the Old Country'' down south; Uncle Castor, the aging jazzman; and Grandfather Eustace in mental decline. Ultimately, Pinckney's unhip narrator embraces art not ideology, loneliness not a lifestyle. Pinckney mocks the racial shibboleths, deftly turns the ironist inward, and scorns his self-indulgence. His voice—in perfect tones and full of timbre—speaks to, not for, ``the black experience'' among those who value character over color.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-16998-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
Chicana writer Castillo (whose reputation until now has been mostly regional) brings a warm, sometimes biting but not bitter feminist consciousness to the wondrous, tragic, and engaging lives of a New Mexico mother and her four fated daughters. Poor Sofi! Abandoned by her gambler husband to raise four unusual girls who tend to rise from adversity only to find disaster. ``La Loca,'' dead at age three, comes back to life—but is unable to bear the smell of human beings; Esperanza succeeds as a TV anchorwoman—but is less successful with her exploitative lover and disappears during the Gulf War; promiscuous, barhopping Caridad—mutilated and left for dead—makes a miraculous recovery, but her life on earth will still be cut short by passion; and the seemingly self-controlled Fe is so efficient that ``even when she lost her mind [upon being jilted]...she did it without a second's hesitation.'' Sofi's life-solution is to found an organization M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), while Castillo tries to solve the question of minority-writer aesthetics: Should a work of literature provide a mirror for marginalized identity? Should it celebrate and preserve threatened culture? Should it be politically progressive? Should the writer aim for art, social improvement, or simple entertainment? Castillo tries to do it all—and for the most part succeeds. Storytelling skills and humor allow Castillo to integrate essaylike folklore sections (herbal curing, saint carving, cooking)—while political material (community organizing, toxic chemicals, feminism, the Gulf War) is delivered with unabashed directness and usually disarming charm.
Pub Date: April 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03490-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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