A perceptive and entrancing meditation on friendship and family, love and forgiveness.
In this debut, May (Fiction Writing/Columbia College Chicago) walks the streets of Parkland on Chicago’s South Side, exploring race, community and religion.
May writes of a town settled by African-Americans fleeing Jim Crow’s South. 1990s Parkland is a stable, middle-class community, with hardworking families long acquainted, each house known to all; redbrick two-flats, large wooden foursquares. May writes of Mrs. Motley, a retired school librarian and insurance agent’s widow, with a son in the Army, stationed at Fort Sill; Mr. Davenport, a teacher and block-club president; Erma Smedley, divorced, beautiful enough that "the men perked up," who is hiding a secret; the Powells and Hicks; and 1960s radical Mrs. Butler, raising grandson Reggie. The familiar tranquility is fractured by Gerald "Stew Pot" Reeves, still young after nearly half a lifetime of imprisonment. Under the prison tutelage of Brother Crown, Stew Pot’s seen "The Light," and he’s intent on exposing the devil in Parkland. Stew Pot’s witnessing soon flames into jeremiads, and as he exposes hidden transgressions, Parkland’s perception of him changes "from the weird-but-harmless category to the crazy-dangerous-hot-list." Stew Pot discovers Erma is a "lesbianite." Erma’s shamed and flees. Stew Pot drives the Davenports away and then frightens Mrs. Hicks, who later dies after collapsing from heatstroke. May writes with meticulous detail, seemingly tedious in listing clothing, houses, shops and churches, but as the complex saga unfolds, his detailed viewpoint lends credence to the humanity of Parkland’s people. Stew Pot’s exposure of secrets causes lifelong friendships to implode, and in a misdirected strike at Stew Pot, Mrs. Motley’s treasured home is burned. With wounded veteran Mr. McTeer and Alderman Vernon Paiger as suitors, May’s Mrs. Motley is a superbly rendered, evolving character and the narrative’s heart: intent on dignified kindness and generosity, on propriety and perspective, yet plagued by unintended consequences and forced to ask herself, "what do you say to the pain of someone who felt horribly wronged by your right?"
A perceptive and entrancing meditation on friendship and family, love and forgiveness.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61775-196-7
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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