For all its considerable pretension, Row’s debut novel offers few insights into the formation of racial consciousness.
A white guy has himself turned black through a total physical makeover in this disjointed first novel about racial identity, which follows Row's two story collections (Nobody Ever Gets Lost, 2011, etc.).
Two men, out of touch since they graduated from high school 20 years earlier, have a chance reunion on a Baltimore street. It’s Martin Wilkinson who stops Kelly Thorndike, because while Kelly doesn't look that different, Martin is now unrecognizable. He tells Kelly he's had “racial reassignment surgery” and is eager to go public about it. Kelly, who's the narrator, is hollowed out by the loss of his wife (who was Chinese) and daughter in a car accident; he's recently lost his job at a public radio station and agrees to help Martin tell his story. He visits Martin’s home and meets his wife, Robin. She's African-American, a high-powered child psychologist at Johns Hopkins; the couple has two adopted children, but Robin doesn’t know her husband’s secret. Martin is less forthcoming about his black-market electronics business. So, why did he do it? The answer is elusive. The son of a gay, nonobservant Jew, he spent his 20s distributing pot on the college circuit. His momentous decision came after a weed and peyote blowout, making it seem an elaborate lark. That Martin is one slick operator becomes even clearer in the concluding section in Bangkok, where he had his surgery. He introduces Kelly to Silpa, his Thai surgeon, and talks about expanding the racial reconstruction business, projecting brands and franchises, patents and payoffs. This is full-blown speculative fiction, a drastic change from the previously realistic framework; then, just as disorienting, Kelly dislodges Martin with his own identity crisis.
For all its considerable pretension, Row’s debut novel offers few insights into the formation of racial consciousness.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59448-834-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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