Accomplished debut fiction.
A May-December romance is at the center of this layered, engaging debut fiction.
The narrator is the articulate, observant photographer Teresa—friends call her Terry, while she is Tatie to her older lover Rhinehart. Terry was Rhinehart’s lover in college; he a visiting professor, she a student. When she reads his obit in the New York Times, she realizes how fresh the wound is, despite the 15 years since their on-again, off-again affair dissolved in tears. But Rhinehart is not dead, but married to Laura, a woman they both knew. Rhinehart is a poet alienated from his muse, remote but benign and obsessed with his complicated family. As love often does for lovers, their feelings for each other cascade through their own lives. Terry resumes her own work and gets help negotiating the predatory New York art scene from an unlikely source. Rhinehart woos his muse and wrestles his demons. Terry tells of her early life, of her best friend Hallie, a conflicted, nervy woman. A housewife in suburban New Jersey, she has too much time on her hands. A dinner party at Hallie’s arid suburban mansion, where recrimination is canapé, is a fraught black comedy. The book features several parties and gives us glimpses of hard partying: This delicate matter—how private lives become public, how our public selves have their own continuity and duration—is handled sensitively. If the arc of the narrative is too parabolic, if the action rises too steadily, Lott’s characterization, dialogue and affection for her characters is winning.
Accomplished debut fiction.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4587-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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