Tall tales need larger-than-life characters; Alistair and Finn are on the small side.
Ginder (This Is How It Starts, 2009), in his second novel, enlists three generations of an American family to illustrate the way myth and fantasy penetrate everyday lives.
The patriarch, Alistair McPhee, a structural engineer working on bridges, used to live in a Hudson Valley town with his wife, Lucy, and only child, Colin. In 1956, when Colin was 8, the family would watch movies every week at the newly opened Avalon Cinema, but within a year, Lucy died of breast cancer; Colin’s father started disappearing on long road trips; and Colin practically lived at the cinema. At 16 he started work at the concession stand with a girl called Clare; he also tracked his father to a neighborhood bar and listened to him entertain a skeptical audience as he recalled fantastical exploits on the road. Eventually, Colin moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter; he sold one screenplay, which was a hit but after that, terminal writer’s block. By chance he met Clare again; they married, had a son, Finn, and then Clare split. The awkwardly constructed novel begins in 2010. Finn is a young man in New York City, editing reality TV shows. His grandfather, Alistair, has had a stroke and is being looked after by Colin in San Francisco. (Finn and Colin alternate as narrators.) Finn gets a call from his granddad: Drive my battered old car across the country and retrieve my memories. The mission is urgent, though much diluted by the flashbacks. Finn motors west with his camcorder and a new buddy. As he admits at the end, he’s an unreliable narrator, so he’s layering a new set of fictions on top of the old. This might be intriguing, or at least good fun, if there was some passion behind the inventions; but only once, in Chicago, ringing the changes on a baseball story, is there a sign of that.
Tall tales need larger-than-life characters; Alistair and Finn are on the small side.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8735-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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