An admirable debut that cannily captures the difficulty of balancing good deeds with bad behavior.
Well-educated but rudderless people seek enlightenment in these stories—or at least an interesting trip and a good high.
The eight stories in Jackson’s debut are populated by bright, artistic men and women who are chafing at the adulthood that’s just about to consume them. The narrator of “Wagner in the Desert” joins a group of friends for one last druggy bacchanal in Palm Springs; in “Epithalamium,” a divorcée bonds with a free-spirited young woman who’s taken up residence in her summer home; “Dynamics in the Storm” is told by a man who helps drive his therapist out of New York in advance of a hurricane, and the sexual tension between them intensifies along with the weather. Those characters and others are, as the book's title suggests, people who've abandoned their roots, and Jackson has a nuanced sense of how a change of scenery can frazzle your sense of self. That’s best exposed in “Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy,” a story about a journalist who winds up in the home of a retired tennis star and how much his own identity curdles as he obsesses over (and to an extent takes on) the athlete’s persona. Jackson’s stories are consistently dark and smart, if sometimes pretentious: Scrabble vocabulary (“salmagundi,” “nevi”) crops up in otherwise sinuous paragraphs, and the philosophizing in the closing “Metanarrative Breakdown” clouds its core story about a man’s visit to his dying grandfather. To be fair, though, telling a story about telling stories is a tough gig, and Jackson is unquestionably a talented and careful writer, deft at delivering a well-turned and effective simile: a wind “forced the trees together like lousy drunks”; a woman observes that “we grow into our toughness like snakes, molting hope.”
An admirable debut that cannily captures the difficulty of balancing good deeds with bad behavior.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-23813-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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