An ambitious domestic drama that nails the domestic parts but doesn’t always sell its drama.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, the Holocaust, and civic corruption are just where the troubles begin for one LA family.
Anne, the much-put-upon heroine of Raymond’s third novel (Rain Dragon, 2012, etc.), is concerned to distraction with three men in her family. Her elderly father, Sam, a Holocaust survivor, resists her efforts to move him into a nursing home; her son, Aaron, is a high school senior with no clear direction; and her brother, Ben, is a former sniper who’s returned from the Middle East with obvious psychic damage. Anne doesn’t exactly have it together herself: a senior staffer at LA County’s Department of Sustainability, she’s getting wooed by an entrepreneur eager to rope her into an unethical scheme to privatize the region’s wastewater. Raymond gestures toward framing this story as a widescreen study of morality and evil: Aaron goes on a road trip with Sam where a theft unlocks some of grandpa’s closely held Auschwitz memories, and Ben’s sanity degrades to the point where he begins plotting assassinations of power brokers. But the novel never quite finds that serious tone, some of which is due to the sprawl of the plot, some of which is due to Raymond’s knack for breezier, ground-level storytelling—he’s at his best when he’s skewering LA’s bureaucracy (“a centerless hive of back channels and side alleys, pitted with private dungeons”) or how Aaron is comically waylaid by a moment of adolescent lust. The novel’s big-picture material tends to feature more pretentious, shapeless prose, as when Ben experiences “eyeless, voiceless faces, wavering in the air, shooting razors of pain”—lines that don’t quite sell the madness that allegedly consumes the ex-sniper. Each character study is thoughtfully constructed, but the novel is less than the sum of its parts.
An ambitious domestic drama that nails the domestic parts but doesn’t always sell its drama.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-760-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
