None
A vibrant landscape of a family shattered by divorce, letting time and choices bring the pieces back together in moving on or letting go.
Ward’s (Hunger, 2001) second novel begins from the perspective of Jack Manoli, lying on his deathbed in the condo he shares with his much younger second wife, Sylvie. His love for Sylvie, his former-secretary-turned-business-partner-and-wife, is absorbing and passionate enough to have caused Jack to start up an affair many years ago and leave his children, Mark and Shelley, with their unstable mother. Upon Jack’s death, his now-adult children are left to decide what is to become of the Rockport lake house that was Sylvie and Jack’s sanctuary, the foundation where their affair solidified into a life together and the site full of bad memories for Mark, as it was where father and son’s relationship broke apart. For Mark, a pot-smoking mosaic artist, art imitates life; his anger is dangerously bottled up, destroying his relationship with his live-in girlfriend just as he shatters ceramic and glass for his mosaic landscapes. Shelley is a teacher working tirelessly to protect her younger brother and create the family life she never had for her husband and two daughters. She hopes to help Mark find a balance “somewhere in between perfection and devastation” creating a reality “where all the many pieces of us—the pleasant and painful—can be reconfigured into an imperfect but solid-enough life”— something their father also strived to create in choosing Sylvie. Ward fashions characters with rich detail, allowing each to leave a distinct impression. While not always likable (Sylvie comes off as a selfish stepmother at times), they are nonetheless genuine. Building layer upon layer of each family member’s story, Ward shows the complexity of divorce from all sides, even revisiting Jack’s thoughts throughout the book. Mark and Shelley are faced with what to do with the lake house and whether to shed the hurt caused by their father’s choices by making new choices for themselves to gain happiness, peace and, ultimately, freedom. A rich, complex novel that mixes art and life into a story about the decisions that lead to healing or hurt.
NonePub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1453860045
Page Count: 349
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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