A matriarchal tale asks who can thrive in small-town America.
Three women—two white and one biracial—reckon with a Michigan hometown each thought she had escaped.
As this debut novel opens on fictional River Bend, “perched just above the state line in the soft crook of the St. Gerard River,” its citizens register the sounds of particular truck and car engines, signaling the comings and goings of the individual townsfolk: “Women, especially those of limited means, must learn to read the signs.” This shrewd line sets up a tale preoccupied with rural American limits and rupture, all marbled with prosaic details, such as meatloaf stretched with too much oatmeal. Mercurial Beth DeWitt has returned from North Carolina with two teenage children, stymied by job loss and divorce. Linda Williams, whom Beth once babysat, retreats from her own cratered marriage in Houston. And Linda’s mother, Paula, who bailed out of River Bend years ago when her kids were small, arrives to secure the divorce from her husband that her Wyoming lover wants for them. Still, the main strip of this tale runs through Beth, who's biracial, damaged by a childhood of macroaggressions and the surly neighborhood babysitter’s malevolent son. Beth's trauma sits astride this book, tucked into short italicized chapters which puncture the present-day story. That story, in turn, brims as Beth’s elderly father impregnates Linda, Beth resumes furtive sex with the town’s alcoholic married bad boy, who reeks of “cigarettes and Aqua Velva,” and Paula dithers with her still-besotted ex. No reader would expect these scenarios to end well, but McFarland knows her way through the murk. Angry women mud-fight in a public pigsty, and the Williams clan navigates a surprisingly recuperative farmhouse Christmas, scrolled out in one long tracking shot. Some of the writing is expository and belabored, but the flood hinted at in the title arrives and delivers. So, in the end, does the story.
A matriarchal tale asks who can thrive in small-town America.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54235-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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