Szalay has written a book about a man who is not unlike the rest of us, a swirling mass of contradictions, of good...
Man Booker Prize finalist Szalay’s (All That Man Is, 2016, etc.) debut novel, originally published in Britain in 2008, is a satire that turns into something more.
At first glance, Szalay's novel reads as something of a portrait of the gone world, with its protagonist, a London advertising salesman named Paul Rainey, trying to nail down a pre-Brexit deal with a German medical client. What makes the narrative pop, though, is its understanding that not all that much has changed between then and now, at least not in the lives of people such as Paul. An alcoholic (“he spends perhaps two hundred pounds a week on alcohol alone,” the author tells us) and a pothead, Paul is also a devoted father figure to his stepson, Oliver, a snooker prodigy. More to the point, he's trying to keep his head above water, to take care of his responsibilities. The novel starts out reminiscent of Martin Amis’ Money, a satire on the advertising and entertainment industries. Quickly, however, it becomes a more nuanced portrait of desire and its discontents, akin to a novel by Martin’s father, Kingsley: Lucky Jim. Like Amis père, Szalay writes with real heart about his protagonist—a man lost in the middle of his own existence, insufficient in love or ambition, unable to live up to what he wants. At the same time, Paul manages to get if not exactly what he wants, then at least what he might need. After a scheme to acquire a new job goes wrong, he is left to make ends meet in whatever way he can. But while Szalay flirts with a variety of expected dissolutions, he ultimately has something more complex in mind. For Paul, losing his job turns out to be the best thing that could have happened, not because it makes life easier but because he has no choice but to engage. “What would happen,” the character wonders, “if he were to walk out, and stay out. What would he do?” The answer is that he cannot, that he needs this ramshackle life even as it confounds him: disconnections, disappointments, and all.
Szalay has written a book about a man who is not unlike the rest of us, a swirling mass of contradictions, of good intentions and less good actions: eager, desperate even, to make the best of circumstance.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-793-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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