Gently comic depiction of love’s power to heal internal and external wounds.
In the Georgia-based author’s debut, a sweet-natured misfit with a debilitating acne problem takes heroic steps to gain control of his life after his live-in girlfriend takes residence at a fancy fat-farm.
Hiding out from the judging eyes of a harsh and beauty-fixated world may have become a way of life for 37-year-old Hobbie, but since high school he at least had a partner with whom to share his exile, his long-time love Kari. With his cystic acne and her obesity, the couple traveled from suburb to suburb, never staying anywhere long enough to make friends or live up to their potential. Tellingly, both were molested by the same church deacon as young teens, shattering their self-images. So when Kari finally decides to make a change in her life and enrolls in a strict in-patient weight-loss program in North Carolina, Hobbie is understandably bereft. Left with their small dog Terry in rural Georgia, and forbidden to contact Kari, he subsists on regular missives that document her rapidly diminishing weight. Wondering when, or if, he will ever see her again, he is shaken out of his stupor when Terry is attacked by a bear. Hobbie fights off the hungry animal with an umbrella and wakes up with an impressive gash on his already ravaged face. Taken in by his de-facto father-in-law Roth—a church bookkeeper guilt-ridden over what happened to his daughter and Hobbie—he discovers a family secret that Kari and her father had been keeping from him. But it is when Roth is suddenly felled by a stroke that Hobbie decides to stop waiting and go after Kari. He hits the road with Roth, Terry and Kari’s estranged mom Sally, in a tragicomic quest to save her from herself. Along the way, Hobbie comes to terms with his past and starts to actually see a future. Full of insight and wonderfully complex characters, this deceptively slim work is emotionally satisfying—assuming readers can get past the frequent gross descriptions of Hobbie’s skin condition.
Gently comic depiction of love’s power to heal internal and external wounds.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7535-1299-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Virgin Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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