Grown-up stuff, with a kind of Gatsby-by-way-of–Henry James subplot. Beautifully written but surely not for the faint of...
Novelist Rechy, still best known for his 1963 debut, City of Night, returns with a steamy tale that, had it appeared then, might well have been banned.
Rechy’s 2008 book, About My Life and the Kept Woman, was subtitled “An Autobiographical Memoir,” which seems rather oddly redundant. His latest is subtitled “A True Fiction,” by which we might assume that the facts are more or less factual while some of the names have been changed to protect the—well, the anything but innocent. The narrator, a young man who just happens to be named John Rechy, is summoned to the coast for an island retreat with a wealthy patron who has read and admired Rechy’s work. “When I read your stories,” says the mysteriously wealthy Paul, “I felt—I know what it’s like to live by one’s wits. That’s how I’ve lived my life, my adult life.” Throw the emphasis on “adult,” and wits hardly enter into the picture, though con games, spectacles of domination, and violations of various laws of the day certainly figure prominently; though decidedly literary, there are plenty of moments where Rechy’s recountings turn from PG into hard X, with rompings and barkings that wouldn’t be out of place in a Frank Harris fan’s hidden-from-the-kids bookshelf. Paul is infinitely curious and demanding as well as being a touch more perceptive about some things than the less worldly John Rechy: when discussing the ways and wherefores of the male hustler, for instance, he intones that the real business at hand is power: “Power, of course, man, sexual power. You wanted power over willing victims.” The sensitive reader will note that power is the currency here, but just how willing some of the victims are is a topic for discussion, at least in the spaces between every possible variation on human coupling.
Grown-up stuff, with a kind of Gatsby-by-way-of–Henry James subplot. Beautifully written but surely not for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2589-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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