A grimly effective entertainment, at once broad as a saber and pointed as a pike.
Kafka is brought up to date for the age of Brexit and Trump.
Never mind that in his Lectures on LiteratureVladimir Nabokov protested that “he approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown”: Gregor Samsa, or, that is, Jim Sams, emphatically starts life as a cockroach in McEwan’s (Machines Like Me, 2019, etc.) reimagining of The Metamorphosis. Then he awakens to discover that he has just four limbs as well as, revoltingly, that “an organ, a slab of slippery meat, lay squat and wet in his mouth.” That unwonted tongue will come in handy, but for the moment Jim has other things to attend to, for he’s not just a human, but also the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Instead of leaving the European Union, he has another item on his agenda: He’s backing a weird economic notion called reverse-flow economics, or Reversalism, whereby "the money flow [will] be reversed....At the end of a working week, an employee hands over money to the company for all the hours she has toiled. But when she goes to the shops, she is generously compensated...for every item she carries away.” It’s easy to get the American president, a fan of “fleet-footed liberation from detail,” to sign on to immiserate the taxpayers once Jim explains that he can take all the money slated for the Pentagon and make it flow up the chain into his own pocket, with the magical result that “seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars would be his.” Why bother small-scale looting when there’s so much pelf to be had? Of course, Jim twigs, the American president is on board only because he was once a cockroach himself, as were the rest of the world’s ruling and governing class, who flourish wherever people tolerate “poverty, filth, squalor” and choose to live in darkness. McEwan sweeps wide but hits home, Nabokov aside: He does a pitch-perfect Trump, pegs Angela Merkel’s bewilderment that her former allies are “inflicting these demands on your best friends,” and highlights the venality of the Leave crowd in Britain today.
A grimly effective entertainment, at once broad as a saber and pointed as a pike.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-08242-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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