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MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM

Name: MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM
Author: Henry Roth
ISBN: 0312119291

by Henry Roth ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 1994

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Sixty years after the classic Call It Sleep, Roth, quite astoundingly, is back inside the consciousness of a Jewish immigrant boy in New York before WW 1—continuing, though with differences, the Joycean rodeo of consciousness that that first book began. Nine-year-old Ira Stigman—the boy-protagonist here—and his parents have just moved from the shtetl-like security of the Lower East Side to "white" Harlem. The bonds of culture are weaker uptown—few Jewish friends, no religious studies—and the insecurity is echoed by the larger world's threats, such as the war (Ira's uncle is drafted, sent off to fight in Europe with a great chorus of sidewalk lamentation—a fine scene that also reminds us how ancient a distaste unmodern Judaism has for soldiering). Ira, though, is more preoccupied with defending himself against Irish bully-boys and the slippery tactics of an upscale grocery store as it makes an arrangement with Prohibition; with fending off various pederastic moves (including one by his teacher) and with his own burgeoning sexuality (mortifyingly, unwillingly, come to focus upon his own mother). In a prose that is formal but warm, Roth tells Ira's tale in a shapely, controlled manner that benefits from the slight aloofness of memory trolling in the depths of very long ago. Interrupting all this are asides addressed to the author's computer ("Ecclesias"). But in these—though they are often touching, the whitened confessions of an old man and long-blocked writer—Roth consciously dilutes what spell he might have spun from Ira's story. A kind of double-entry bookkeeping, the contemporary musings of the octogenarian unavoidably call forth a pathos that the Ira-narrative wants to keep well away. And so the emotional temperature of the whole work falls out of whack—with spots too warm, spots too cold: never quite a steady climate. Still, Roth's return is a genuine event—and Call It Sleep devotees will find it unthinkable not to see what it's all about.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994

ISBN: 0312119291

Page Count: 304

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
REQUIEM FOR HARLEM
by Henry Roth

- BOOK REVIEW
FROM BONDAGE
by Henry Roth

- BOOK REVIEW
A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSON
by Henry Roth

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Awards & Accolades

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14

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

14

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.