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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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