Another new fictional world entered, as Updike himself enters old age, with skills and ambitions very much intact.
Updike’s 20th novel is, like its predecessor, Gertrude and Claudius (2000), yet another illustration of this adventurous writer’s enduring curiosity, versatility, and stylistic energy.
In a single unbroken scene, well-known (if not precisely “famous”) painter Hope Chafetz is interviewed in her rural Vermont home by young New York City journalist Kathryn D’Angelo. Their day-long session begins as Kathryn probes for details about Hope’s first husband, Zack McCoy, an ebullient, self-destructive nonrepresentational painter (“America’s marvelous drip machine”) whose checkered career and violent accidental death unmistakably parallel the life and death of Jackson Pollock. Hope keeps meandering, the stern Kathryn keeps tugging her back to the subject at hand—and Updike gradually builds the reader’s confidence in his loose structuring, in which flashbacks of varying length and fullness are triggered by both random musings and pointed specific questions. The initial impression of contrivance fades, as the richness of detail has its way with us. The result is a compact panoramic view of the postwar “revolution” in American art, especially among the Long Island crowd surrounding Zack/Pollock; (sometimes forced and tedious) reiterations of conflicting theories about “the redemptive mission of paint” and the artist’s responsibilities to society and to himself; and Hope’s fragmented personal history, including her second marriage to commercially successful collagist Guy Holloway (another dead ringer, this time for Andy Warhol) and conflicted motherhood to the three children she bore him, a happy third marriage to a companionable stockbroker and art collector, and her sturdy passage into solitary, meditative old age. The story can be faulted for its cook’s-tour approach to the history of modern art, but its portrayal of the unillusioned Hope’s understanding of her limits, and of her difference and distance from the passionate risk-takers who were her contemporaries and confederates, is stunningly revealing.
Another new fictional world entered, as Updike himself enters old age, with skills and ambitions very much intact.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41490-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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