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
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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