Well-practiced, from a voice we’ll surely hear from again.
Murray, himself an MD, debuts with eight stories that draw their strengths from medicine and arcane subject matter.
The people and situations seem real, and the splashes of science and lingering nostalgia (“He will remember the sounds of the market through the open window. But it is the unopened letter that he will remember most clearly”) make for fiction that will appeal to fans of, say, Ethan Canin and The English Patient. The title story’s aging surgeon’s marriage to a much younger and eventually pregnant Indian doctor, Maya, serves as contrast to his grandfather’s obsession with butterflies, the largest species of which he will consume human flesh to obtain. But when the grandson begins to obsess too, will the old butterfly collection come along with the curse of the grandfather’s suicide and possibly interfere with the pregnancy? A young man in “All the Rivers in the World” journeys to Florida to retrieve his father, who has shacked up with a woman half his age, while “White Flour” is another wacky father-abandonment piece. “Watson and the Shark” concerns doctors in Africa tending to the knifed masses in an atrocity, and “The Carpenter who Looked Like a Boxer” finds a young cuckold hearing phantom termites in his house a year after his masochistic wife has left. The final story, “Acts of Memory, Wisdom of Man,” is another powerful patriarch doctor/bug setup, though this time the whole family is Indian and the bugs are beetles. Murray often refers to great writers but rarely pulls the stops and tries actually to write like them, even when it seems within his scope. “There are a thousand interesting facts about beetles, each of which teaches us something important about the nature of life,” the final father tells us. But this begs the question of Murray’s work: What happens when you take away all the fascinating factoids?
Well-practiced, from a voice we’ll surely hear from again.Pub Date: March 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050928-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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