Michener now shifts his fictionalizing, schoolmasterly talents to the contemporary world of book publishing, offering clear explanations of simple phenomena but grossly oversimplifying complex issues and people. His many fans, however, may well relish the 464-page book's lack of ambiguity and irony, or any disagreeable dissonances, as Michener tells his tale through the points of view in turn of an author, an editor, a critic, and a reader—decent folk all. The author here, an elderly Pennsylvania Dutchman—a steady, workmanlike writer who produces book after book about his native region—resembles Michener in his nose-to-the-grindstone worthiness. Michener also provides him with the opportunity for lectures on the differences between the Amish and the Mennonites and on the makings of scrapple and good German rice pudding. Meanwhile, the editor, through her love for a self-destructive writer who can't finish a book, shows the dangers of unbridled talent. The critic, a closeted gay college professor, despises the plodding author's work and represents an elitist view of the novelist's art. (Here, Michener makes room for a lengthy digression on who should get kudos and who should be cudgeled among English and American writers.) Finally, the reader, a wealthy widow of philanthropic bent, ties the threads together with her benign coda, which includes a neatly solved mystery and the resolution of the other major characters' fates. The chief locale is the Pennsylvania Dutch countryside. It rings truer than the characters, who tend to talk alike in measured, overly formal words. As for simplifying issues, a brouhaha at a publishing house focuses on the new ownership being German, skirting the knottier problems of conglomerate control. Michener turns a big chunk of the book world into an easily digested stew only the undemanding will find nourishing or tasty.
Pub Date: March 30, 1991
ISBN: 0449221431
Page Count: -
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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