Pleasantly nostalgic if occasionally exhausting; an ode to a city—and an era—long gone.
A swirling, name-dropping, drug-fueled, hypersaturated whirlwind of a novel set against the New York City of the 1980s and '90s, Kobek’s latest (I Hate the Internet, 2016, etc.) is a gritty coming-of-age story with quiet heart.
After the gruesome deaths of both his parents (“my mother killed my father, or was it my father who murdered my mother?”), a gay high school grad from small-town Wisconsin shows up in New York City, wanders into a squalid squat, christens himself Baby Baby Baby (just Baby, for short), and meets a rich girl with yellow sneakers who will immediately and forever change his life. Adeline, who speaks with the self-consciously stilted diction of an old Hollywood movie star—a grating habit, both for the reader and, presumably, for her friends—is a Parsons freshman, an ebullient poor-little-rich-girl with an alcoholic mother and a dead dad. Without thinking twice, she invites Baby to come live with her in her dorm room off Union Square—“you’re a sailor without any port of call,” she tells him—and the two fall into a fast and complicated friendship. As the years tick by—from Reagan to Bush to Clinton—Adeline and Baby, both artistic and, in their own ways, ambitious, come together and fall apart and come together again as the city pulses around them. The book’s tertiary characters read like a who’s who of the times: gay sci-fi writer Thomas M. Disch lives in their building—an early role model for Baby, who will also become a science-fiction writer, though he doesn’t yet know it—but also David Wojnarowicz, Bret Easton Ellis, Norman Mailer, and Dorian Corey of Paris Is Burning fame. There is a prolonged period, in the late '80s when Baby becomes a Club Kid, thereby making the acquaintance of both Michael Alig and the man, Angel Melendez, whom Alig would later murder with a hammer. But to the extent that there is propeller to the book, besides the passage of time, it is the bond between Baby and Adeline, which outlives even their own shifting identities.
Pleasantly nostalgic if occasionally exhausting; an ode to a city—and an era—long gone.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2248-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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