A potentially hilarious cogitation on art and artists that fails to fully exploit its comic potential.
A film critic in a dystopian near future ruminates on life and art in the pages of his movie reviews.
This eccentric debut by Mattson offers a deviant take on the epistolary novel by couching its sad tale of regret in the pages of 80 movie reviews. Our esteemed author is professional nobody Noah Body, one of two film critics for a content aggregator dubbed the Central Hub Slaw, a publication with so few readers that Body treats his column as a kind of personal soapbox/therapy session. Body’s world is kind of a mess after some unknown blight locals call “the crisis,” with neighborhoods divided into safe zones and places like "Mini Aleppo," where Body lives; citizens “chipped” with GPS trackers; and travel taking place by suborbital “slingshot” capsules. The ghost that haunts Body’s story is his ex-wife, Isabel, who has recently run off with his best frenemy, James Osvald, a clerk and amateur filmmaker whose death Body imagines with glee. “Isabel who was my wife,” says Body. “I don’t see her well anymore. Her face is like the face of a coin. The mold deforms as years of minting pass.” On the domestic front, Body romances his therapist, Dr. Lisa, believes that Osvald has possessed his body, and plots the making of a complex period film called Altarpiece set in the Renaissance and backed by fellow critic Harris V. Jonson. The book’s humor is often wry, but subplots involving Jonson’s cheating wife and a thuggish vending machine tycoon trying to horn in on Body’s film are far less engaging than his aberrant rivalry with Osvald. The gimmick of the novel, the 80 phantasmagoric films that Body critiques, is dryly funny, but readers may tire of Body’s deadpan, aristocratic wit despite his outlandish surroundings.
A potentially hilarious cogitation on art and artists that fails to fully exploit its comic potential.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52284-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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