An instructive portrait of the flying life, but one that requires some patience to enjoy.
Salter’s earliest (and nearly forgotten) two novels dealt with Air Force pilots—and now, in the literary version of a rescue mission, he has “entirely rewritten” the second one, his long-out-of-print The Arm of Flesh (1961).
Renamed Cassada, after its main character, the story centers on life in the 44th Fighter Squadron, stationed in Germany in 1955. The wars are over, so these F-86 pilots don’t have much to do other than fly exercise missions, drink at the Officers’ Club, and occasionally explore Munich. Into this virile, restless society, where pilots trust their wingmen with their lives, enters a wide-eyed newcomer, Cassada, who annoys everyone from the start: he’s afraid of caffeine, he can’t shoot straight, and he spills champagne on the commander’s wife. It also doesn’t help that, despite his naive charm, he’s a slightly petulant, reckless character who some consider a liability in the sky. Salter (most recently, Burning the Days, 1997, etc.), himself a former Air Force pilot, employs a fairly standard new-guy-in-town storyline, relying heavily on terse and occasionally flat dialogue to depict the conflicts in the squadron. More striking than his characterizations are the realistic observations of Air Force life—the younger men’s disappointment at not having a chance to see combat; the fact that good pilots die in accidents more often than bad ones; the abundance of weirdly memorable aeronautical terms. But these details, while vivid, don’t by themselves stir dramatic interest. Only in the final third do things get going, as two pilots repeatedly attempt to land through hazardous clouds. In these last chapters, Salter's most compelling character—the villainous weather—comes to the fore, and the author finally releases some verbal tension in a handful of breathtaking passages.
An instructive portrait of the flying life, but one that requires some patience to enjoy.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-887178-89-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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