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
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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