Energetic, if uneven.
A young British woman ditches both her boyfriend and her Ph.D. program for a temporary reprieve catsitting in New York City and finds herself enmeshed in the lives of a charismatic aging writer and his aggressively free-spirited daughter in Hoby’s debut.
Taking up residence in the budget boho home of her mother’s one-time best friend—now off on a post-divorce round-the-world tour of self-discovery (“You gotta live, you know?” she advises)—Kate arrives in New York in the summer of 2012 with no particular plan except avoiding her actual life at home. She is lost—in the city, existentially—which makes her available to chance and amenable to risk, and it is in this unmoored state, riding the waves of the city, that she meets Inez, an arrestingly beautiful recent high school grad and lackluster barista who moonlights fulfilling the fantasies of men from Craigslist. It is a modern Shakespearian comedy that brings them together: Inez is waiting for someone named Kate to show up and buy Adderall and meets our Kate instead, a Kate, but not the one she is looking for, and the two strike up an uneasy friendship. Kate is attracted to Inez’s edge; Inez is drawn to Kate’s blank-seeming straightness. But the city, it turns out, is not all that big, and at a gallery opening (enormous paintings of video stills of pornography), Kate meets Bill, a one-hit wonder novelist who has, since his publication at 24, which was followed by a movie adaptation, become a professor, divorced, and assumed his position as bitterly cool dad. What Kate doesn’t know on their first date— doesn’t know until an inevitable scene much later—is that he is, specifically, the father of Inez. Vivid as they are, both Bill and Inez never quite stop feeling like familiar sketches, types of people who never quite ascend to the status of individuals. Kate, meanwhile, rides their waves, a cypher, her distinguishing characteristic being her general lack of them. But Hoby is a master of atmosphere, and if the characters don’t stick, the vibrant loneliness of the city does.
Energetic, if uneven.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-936787-75-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
