Such plot strands (there are plenty more) initially defy credulity, but as the novel progresses, it’s a bigger surprise when...
Sometimes a novel’s surface weaknesses reveal themselves as underlying strengths. Such is the case with A Fortunate Age, the debut by Joanna Smith Rakoff. The novel initially seems derivative, contrived and cliched. But ultimately it is brilliantly so, subverting all that has inspired it.
In her acknowledgments, the author reserves final credit for, “of course, Mary McCarthy, to whose marvelous novel, The Group, my own is, of course, an homage.” The template of following a group of friends through the travails of early adulthood will forever be associated with McCarthy, but Claire Messud more recently employed the model to greater literary effect with The Emperor’s Children. A similar dynamic has propelled the film The Big Chill and the TV series Friends. Among the conventions of such rites-of-passage narratives are that some of the friends will succeed beyond expectation, some will fall short of their promise and others will couple improbably. Life will not turn out as they’d planned. In Rakoff’s novel, the six friends have moved from Ohio’s Oberlin (where the author attended college) to New York—mainly hipster Brooklyn. The narrative begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. In between, it chronicles six years that are filled with such belief-straining coincidence, startling leaps between cause and effect and shallowness of character that it initially seems that the novelist doesn’t know what she’s doing. Until it becomes obvious that she knows exactly what she’s doing—skewering both the soap-opera conventions of such a narrative and the values of the generation that spawned this one. Clueless offspring of self-righteous boomer parents, these post-slackers stumble into marriage as heedlessly as some drunks stumble into bed. One has fallen in love with an actor buddy from college, until she has a chance encounter with an FBI agent, who loses her when she is impregnated by a hotshot magazine editor turned film director. Another is a promising actress replaced by a bigger name when the production moves to Broadway. She subsequently falls for a married indie-rock singer, moonlights as a bartender so she can make money to care for her previously institutionalized sister, is pursued by a psychiatrist who insists the sister needs further treatment—and then marries the psychiatrist and becomes a doctor herself.
Such plot strands (there are plenty more) initially defy credulity, but as the novel progresses, it’s a bigger surprise when chance encounters don’t lead to life-changing relationships, as if the plot were a literary pinball machine with characters bouncing off each other randomly. Still not sure what they want to be when they grow up, they are well-schooled in the hippest indie labels, the trendiest Brooklyn blocks and the hottest spots to meet for cappuccino, but they have absolutely no idea how to navigate love, marriage and jobs, which they both deride and desire as “a normal life.” Here’s hoping for a sequel, when all of them will be older, and none will be wiser.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9077-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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