Strongest when Johnny is among his taunting brothers and concerned parents back in suburban Maryland, far from the parochial...
Fans of critic Wolcott, who’s written some of the funniest, most penetrating cultural reviews of the last 25 years, will be surprised by this, his first book, a novel that’s so milquetoast you have to wonder if it’s really by the same James Wolcott, scourge of shabby prose and shoddy thinking.
A weak sally in the war between the sexes, Wolcott’s breezy guide to modern romance in New York City has all the soul of a second-rate sitcom. Johnny Downs, a thirtysomething “actor slash bartender,” has just been dumped again, this time by his go-getting girlfriend Nicole, who commits the sin of sins: forgetting to feed Johnny’s cherished cat, Slinky, while Johnny was visiting family down in Maryland. The 17-year-old furball is about the only faithful companion in Johnny’s world, except for his long-distance confidante Darlene Ryder, a smart-talking southerner who’s determined to transform Johnny into husband material. Finding Johnny “malleable,” and “oblivious” (like most men), Darlene dictates her advice over the telephone, countering the caveman attitude of Johnny’s best friend, Tom Gleason, a fellow actor constantly on the prowl. Johnny goes through a quick list of potential mates: Claudia, bitch goddess actress, who doesn’t even make it through one date; Amanda, her wealthy friend, who benefits from Darlene’s counterintuitive guidebook; and Kris, a sexy young thing Darlene sends north, partly to spoil Johnny’s success with Amanda. When Johnny discovers Darlene’s duplicity, and her considerable secrets are revealed, he breaks from his cracked Svengali and courts a gamine photographer, Annette, nevertheless benefiting from Darlene’s sensitivity training. Meanwhile, Johnny’s career takes a turn for the better: he channels all his male angst and anger into a performance piece that catches the eye of the theater crowd and TV producers.
Strongest when Johnny is among his taunting brothers and concerned parents back in suburban Maryland, far from the parochial Manhattanites. And Wolcott is incapable of writing inept prose. But all the defining features of his best book, film, and television reviews are absent here: wit, skepticism, insight. Those who’ve suffered his scorn will be loaded for kill.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019414-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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