A brash literary thriller that plunges deep into the mind of a criminal and his creator.
An elderly crime novelist’s last work and a shady crook’s errand overlap in Winner’s (The Cannibal of Guadalajara, 2010) fictional nod to Patricia Highsmith.
Tyler Wilson is eking out a living in Europe as a small-time player in a crime syndicate when a mysterious phone call brings up demons from the past. The caller says he is Cal Thornton, a man who Tyler thought was long dead. In fact, Tyler killed Cal in Stromboli in the 1960s, then promptly posed as Cal to get the Thorntons to send him money. Tyler is rattled by the call from the impostor, but a new errand from his crime boss sends him to New York. He decides to become an impostor himself and change his identity, go to Connecticut, and try to convince the Thorntons that he is in fact the long-lost Cal. Meanwhile, an old woman in France suffering from Parkinson’s disease gets an email from a former lover, Tab, a Dutch performance artist. The woman is frail, incontinent, and impulsive and decides she can't finish her novel unless she goes to the Netherlands to seek out the elusive Tab. Hiring an Ecuadorean driver, the woman and her trusty cahier hit the road, at which time it becomes clear that her fiction is steering the events in Tyler’s life, and he and Cal may be creations of hers altogether. Winner’s characters are drawn in the style of Highsmith novels, with Tyler taking the Tom Ripley role. Born in Queens to a washerwoman mother, Tyler finds himself decades later in a Spanish villa overlooking the Mediterranean, where he “sips more white Rioja and chews spicy grilled squid at his favorite chiringuito.” Like Ripley, he knows the local vernacular wherever he goes, and his not-gay lifestyle involves the obsessive and destructive pursuit of men. The spitfire old woman, as Highsmith herself, weaves a sordid tale on two different, almost delirious levels. Winner’s writing is intense, provocative, slightly perverse, and satisfyingly comic (Tyler “wants to explain to the false Cal Thornton that the real Cal Thornton had absolutely been burned away—blazing petrol from their motorboat plus several bottles of burning booze”). The competing plots and the novel-within-a-novel format are propelled by an earthy and sexual literary voice whose wily sophistication is both coarse and unique.
A brash literary thriller that plunges deep into the mind of a criminal and his creator.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937402-78-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Outpost19
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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