Even one of the novelist’s lesser efforts has the signature style, edge and heart to delight fans.
The bard of blue-collar Boston crime returns with a sleight-of-hand novel tinged with sin and redemption.
The latest from Lehane (Live by Night, 2012, etc.) is a novel with an unusual genesis, and it’s shorter and less intricate than usual. It began when he was asked to adapt one of his short stories (“Animal Rescue”) for a movie. Though his novels have seen success on the big screen, this was his screenwriting debut, and it preceded the writing of this book, which might be dismissed, in lesser hands, as a “novelization” of the film. It’s richer than a mere re-creation of a movie on the page because the author gets inside the heads and thoughts of his characters in a way that a movie generally can’t. And this particular perspective is crucial when it comes to protagonist Bob, a keep-to-himself bartender who works for Cousin Marv. Both men, like pretty much every man in their neighborhood, have some sort of shady past, but the two have apparently gone comparatively straight. Yet Cousin Marv’s bar remains used by the Chechen mobsters who own it as a money drop for transferring funds. Such is the backdrop for what appears to be the main plot, in which lonesome, loveless Bob finds a beaten puppy in a trash can and is persuaded by a woman who witnesses the incident (and who has her own questionable past) to take it home. Since “all he wanted was to not be alone,” the connection with both the dog and the woman proves so transforming that he “suspected they might have been brought together by something other than chance.” But there’s another connection, a crazy thug and rumored killer who claims that both the dog and the woman are his. As the novel progresses, every character has secrets and revelations—except maybe Rocco, the dog—as the plot pivots in some surprising directions.
Even one of the novelist’s lesser efforts has the signature style, edge and heart to delight fans.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-236544-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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