An inventive exploration of the place where love, chance, expectations and ambitions intersect in the city that never sleeps.
A novel within a novel spanning one eventful spring day in New York.
There’s nothing special about Larry Bloom, a city tour guide, aspiring novelist and loser in love. As the novel begins, he laments that “there hasn’t been a civil rights movement for the nondescript and homely people of the world.” On the flip side is the object of Larry’s affection, Starshine Hart, whose physical beauty shines. Larry has written a novel for and about Starshine, from her perspective, an imagined narrative about the day he will reveal his love for her as well as the existence of his book and—with luck—the fact that it is to be published. Everything hinges on the contents of the letter from Stroop & Stone, Publishers, which Larry picks up in the book’s opening pages and tucks away to open later. At first, the structure of Appel’s (The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, 2012, etc.) novel—the purportedly real-time adventures of Larry interwoven with chapters from Larry’s book—seems a familiar approach in emulation of John Irving (The World According to Garp, 1978), Kurt Vonnegut (Mother Night, 1961, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969, etc.) or Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000). What’s different here, though, is that the “real world” action and the fictional events of Larry’s novel are taking place on the same day and that all of the events and musings from each narrative thread will somehow have to come together at day’s end, in a real-world conclusion, when Larry and Starshine have their date. To read the book—to separate out the “fact” of Larry’s story from the “fiction” of the book about Starshine and to realize that all we learn of Starshine is filtered through Larry’s romantic and novelistic ambitions—is to undergo an exercise in what Appel describes, in the question-and-answer section at the end of the book, as postmodern romance: “hyper-aware, ambivalent, fragmented.” Interwoven plot points—things Larry couldn’t possibly have known about in order to have written about them in advance—further stress the fact that readers’ understanding of time, cause and effect is fragmented and partial at best. Still, Appel’s clever, evocative prose deftly navigates the story’s witty dialogue, high drama and only occasionally overblown imagery.
An inventive exploration of the place where love, chance, expectations and ambitions intersect in the city that never sleeps.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0975374689
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Elephant Rock Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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