The work of a young writer still seeking his own voice. When McManus finds it, the results may be spectacular.
Claustrophobic first novel about an embattled and haunted Southern boyhood.
As he did in his story collections, Stop Breakin Down (2000) and Born on a Train (2002), Whiting Award-winner McManus employs familiar Southern Gothic conventions (a conflicted dysfunctional family, gender confusion, a hurt sense of time passing and landscapes changing) in relating nine-year-old Loren Garland’s hesitant efforts to escape the twin prisons of his loneliness and his morbid obesity. Loren’s single mom, Avery, has turned her back on both motherhood and womanhood, preparing for a sex-change operation while hiding in a mountaintop retreat (the story is set during the 1980s in Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains). Loren’s recently bereaved grandfather (“Papaw”)—a mordant amalgam of Faulkner’s Flem Snopes and Al Capp’s Pappy Yokum—“writes” tuneless bawdy songs while reluctantly selling his sterile farmland to a greedy developer. And Loren suffers the abuse of relatives he’s sent to live with, the taunts of heartless schoolmates and a hysterically paranoid schoolteacher, and the “advice” of invisible companion Luther, who is, variously, the twin that died when Loren was born, the voice of his embryonic conscience or a hallucinatory “component of his memories.” The narrative moves toward a kind of liberation, as Loren makes a separate peace with Papaw, foreseeing the shape of his hitherto occluded future—and Luther, like Shakespeare’s Ariel, sensing his mission accomplished, seizes his freedom. The result is a densely atmospheric, propulsive tale (presented without chapter breaks) that doesn’t quite work, because McManus can’t seem to decide who or what Luther (the sometimes obtrusive, sometimes concealed narrator) is; and because Bitter Milk contains numbingly top-heavy echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper; Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and (especially) Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café.
The work of a young writer still seeking his own voice. When McManus finds it, the results may be spectacular.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-30193-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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