This first novel from a popular 'zine writer has youth-cult exploitation written all over it, and Gallagher lives down to a publisher's worst expectation: His portrait of the artist as a young punk journalist combines all the self-pity and self- aggrandizing one could expect in such a callow effort. The conceit here is painfully obvious: The narrator's badly damaged teeth, which he delays getting fixed, are a correlative for his slacker angst. Twenty-two-year-old Neil is ``fame hungry,'' but clings to his self-image as a ``struggling downtown writer,'' ``New Jack Poet Warrior,'' and ``Irish Samurai.'' Skipping college, and leaving Nowheresville, PA, Neil drops-in at NYU while churning out punk/gonzo prose for the Manhattan-based skateboard 'zine Dusted. Having smashed his mouth while diving from a window at a high- school brew bash, Neil makes his dental trauma the recurring motif of his manifesto in progress, Neil Before God, a few chapters of which appear in Dusted before its sudden demise. While his colleagues ``sell-out'' to skateboard companies, their rival mainstream mag, Bop Cheese, and Hollywood, Neil stays true to his punk ethos. Which means he's broke, has no job, no woman, and an unfinished book. The California wedding of his former editor draws Neil west, where he's disgusted by his erstwhile friends, especially Flash, who now hosts an ``alternative rock'' show. Worse, he discovers that Flash's East Coast poverty was a pose. Full of class resentment, Neil decides it's time to leave the country. In search of his dream woman—an Italian he once met in London—he takes off for her homeland, a nation of bad dentistry, and there he gets involved with a band of punk anarchists determined to turn a concert into a full-scale riot. At last, after a long night of bad drugs, Neil returns stateside to have his teeth, finally, repaired. Gallagher chews on more than he's bit off in this puerile bit of self-puffery. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-55166-3
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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