McGarry at her best pushes the envelope just past realism in a way that can be comic, creepy, and poignant, putting her in...
Short stories dominated by postwar Irish-American families and marked by an entertainingly strange sensibility.
In her ninth book, McGarry (Ocean State, 2010, etc.) veers from conventional to consciously weird. And even her conventional is often a bit out there. Several households feature Irish-American Catholics in the 1950s-'60s with at least one would-be nun or priest. There’s usually too much booze and anger and too little money. Children often bear the brunt of the overall title’s irony. In “Tower of Ivory, House of Gold,” a teen nun wannabe panics when her fervor wanes and mortifies her flesh with coarse twine and sandpaper. One story is narrated by a boy who sounds like a noir hoodlum and gets in trouble while trying on priestly vestments in a Catholic supplies store (“And the Little One Said”). In “Sleeping Beauty," a girl constantly spits out pieces of fur, like a human cat, angering her mother, who sends her to school on her birthday wearing an enema bag as a necklace. The less-oblique fairy-tale retelling of “Rella” has Cinderella find a bracelet in a doughnut. Two couples, both childless, enjoy some normalcy. One appears in a hodge-podge of a tale that traces the back story of a lesbian couple (“The System”). The other appears in a long story titled “Someone Is There.” A psychiatrist falls in love with his first inpatient, a woman mired in depression when her religious vocation vanishes; her three brothers are priests. When his sessions are over for the day, the shrink finds “his own ego [is] replenished” by driving in his antique Mercedes Benz, named Hildegard.
McGarry at her best pushes the envelope just past realism in a way that can be comic, creepy, and poignant, putting her in the school of Lorrie Moore and George Saunders.Pub Date: April 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94315-007-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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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