Gaines competently reveals his central character's motivations, but that might not be enough to make readers care about the...
A young reporter on assignment learns the history of a town’s black community.
After graduating from college in California, Louis Guerin has returned to his Louisiana hometown to work as a reporter for the Bayonne Journal, the weekly newspaper. As the story opens, a man named Brady Sims shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of two crimes, in front of the judge, jury, and courthouse bystanders, including Louis, who's covering the case. Assigned to write "a human interest story" on Brady, Louis spends a day at the town barbershop and learns that his subject was the disciplinarian for the quarter, the town’s black section, whipping children (mostly boys) who erred in an effort to keep them from the worse fate of ending up in Angola, the infamous state prison. As the barbers, customers, and shop loiterers talk, they offer a fuller and occasionally sympathetic picture of Brady while simultaneously showing how World War II, technology, and the Great Migration caused strife for those living in the quarter. Those larger themes, though central to the story, are expressed perhaps at the expense of a deeper portrayal of Brady. Though Mapes, the town sheriff and one of Brady's only friends, attempts to provide nuance to the character of a reputedly violent man, his testimony does not quite help generate adequate sympathy for Brady. In his first novel in more than 20 years, National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gaines (Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays, 2005, etc.) returns to the themes (crime, punishment, and compassion) and milieu (the rural South) for which he is best known, telling a simple yet provocative tale that reverberates from its Southern core, with a keen ear for the way men talk when they are among each other. Though readers may come to understand Brady’s motivations for killing his son in this expertly rendered story, they may do so with varying levels of sympathy for him.
Gaines competently reveals his central character's motivations, but that might not be enough to make readers care about the man's fate.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-43446-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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