This beautifully written, carefully plotted, intelligent debut is a melancholy pleasure.
A gay teenager with a traumatic past takes up his dead lover’s quest for the elixir of life.
Conrad, the on-and-off narrator of Wolff’s debut novel, lost his mother to a fire at age 10, and soon afterward his father descended into alcoholism, liver disease, and furious gloom. When the novel opens, he’s a high school senior living with his aunt, having an affair with his chemistry teacher, and working on a science project about electroshock and memory in rats. When the teacher, Sammy Tampari, is found dead—from suicide? a drug overdose? an experiment gone wrong?—Conrad is pulled ever deeper into an alchemical plot he had not known he was part of, seeking a medical treatment that will save his father by vanquishing death itself. The novel straddles a few decades surrounding the present, ducking back to Sammy’s youth as a depressed gay teenager himself and forward into Conrad’s future as a scientist worried about his husband’s brain-cancer diagnosis. The narration shifts around between first person and third, the point of view alternates between Conrad and Sammy, and the settings include Maine, New York City, Romania, and Easter Island as strongmen, drug dealers, and pharmaceutical researchers join the hunt for a panacea that can cross the blood-brain barrier. More than just a briskly plotted thriller, the book is a meditation on love and loss. The characters’ obsession with the elixir brings home the parallels between eternal life and death: Both are a kind of certainty. The best part is the author’s figurative descriptions, which teeter between quips and revelations. Conrad describes his aunt’s concern for him: “I knew that…the way she treated me, was called ‘love,’ even though it made me feel small and different and as if I would never be loved by anyone the way I was meant to be (like someone who deserved love and didn’t simply need it, like a blood transfusion).” When his lover apologizes, “I had steeled myself to stay angry, but his voice was a snake-bite. Happiness filled me like venom.” Sammy contemplates his own mental state: “The real torture of mental illness is this lingering sensation that normalcy is a thought away, that if only you were strong enough, you could think your way out of it.”
This beautifully written, carefully plotted, intelligent debut is a melancholy pleasure.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-17066-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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