Memorable. May the author now fearlessly face a novel.
Debut collection of seven intelligent short stories and a novella about Asian-Americans, mostly centered in coastal California, by the editor of Ploughshares.
Even at sea in a fishing boat, Lee anchors readers in the minds of his characters, who are deeply immersed in their occupations: piloting, engineering, golfing, making chairs, or even taking up amateur boxing. Yet work is always a vehicle through which the author defines characterizations and reveals emotion. In “The Price of Eggs in China,” two poets—rich, swaddled Marcella Ahn and slobby, struggling Caroline Yip—publish at the same time, get reviewed in tandem, and then fade. Six years later, Caroline takes up with Dean Kaneshiro, an artist who hand-sculpts chairs (bought by the White House), but then finds her life again invaded by Marcella, who wants Dean for herself. “Widowers” limns two different responses to loss. Charter boat captain Alan Fujitani, whose wife died 20 years ago, takes a 22-year-old woman out to sea to dump her despised husband’s ashes into the waves. They later strike up a wavering affair, though Alan is still heartbroken, haunted daily by memories of his dead spouse. Lee’s most ambitious piece here is the novella, “Yellow,” which gets under the skin of Korean Danny Kim. A dashingly athletic and handsome student who beds but fails to stick with several white girls, he finally marries a Korean chosen by his mother. His wife is the first Asian woman he ‘s ever slept with, and the marriage nearly dies under the pressure of his supremely disciplined climb toward a partnership in a Boston engineering firm. Danny’s response to race prejudice is to attempt to rise above his skin. His story has an absolutely wonderful twist impossible to foresee, and it demonstrates Lee’s strength in a longer form.
Memorable. May the author now fearlessly face a novel.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-02562-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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