Where you can see the stars at noon, a Dante reader will know, is in Hell—and Johnson, who has plumbed the territory before in Angels (1983) here surveys a corner of it that is Sandinista Nicaragua, 1984. His narrator is a female American semi-journalist, semi-hooker, a woman whose entropy is her strongest suit, who hustles at the bar of the Inter-Continental Hotel in Managua against a background of brain-frying tropical heat and the appalling self-destruction of a hapless society. Not a book, in other words, you'd give as a gift to your local Witness for Peace: in Johnson's portrait, Nicaragua comes off as a catastrophe plain and simple. And a menacing one, too. After the narrator meets a pale, tall, bumbling Englishman who represents an oil company and seems to have accidentally made vague commitments to Sandinista, Contra, and CIA alike, she finds herself in love/lust with the schmo but also having to fear for her life: he's casually but irrevocably been marked, and she'll get it also unless they can escape the country at the nearest border. That, in the end, she will, saving herself but also betraying her lover, is somehow only fitting in the jaundiced, ashen-mouthed scheme of the book. Some fine, illusionless, poetic prose is put to this purpose—but Johnson is working more with language and mood here than with people: the Englishman is especially nebulous and jellied, while the narrator, who over-quotes W.S. Merwin, also speaks in what's-it-to-ya dialogue that would have given even Raymond Chandler pause. What is most memorable—why this might have been a better non-fiction book—are the atmospheres: sounds, feels, smells; Johnson delivers an evocative and potently depressing travelogue, and does so with more savvy and unromantic political velleity than is found in books by, say, Graham Greene or Joan Didion. Ugly as sin but a little too pleased with that, maybe.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1986
ISBN: 978-0-394-53840-2
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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