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
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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