To the book’s credit, Mohr never loses the story’s emotional heart.
A midlife crisis takes a handful of surreal turns in Joshua Mohr’s (Damascas, 2011, etc.) latest novel.
Bob Coffen has two kids, a suburban home, an athlete wife whom he adores and a successful career building violent video games. But as his marriage begins to crumble, Bob’s life becomes unhinged in sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant ways. The story opens on a bad day for Bob: He’s been insulted by his boss and nearly run over by his neighbor, Schumann, a macho type who’s never gotten over his football-hero past. Then, his wife, Jane, drags him to a marital seminar held by magician Bjorn the Bereft, whose conjuring tricks literally put Bob’s marriage on thin ice. When Jane throws him out of the house, Bob enlists Schumann as his coach and begins a quest to pull himself together. He first bonds with Tilda, a waitress at his favorite fast-food joint who has a profitable sideline doing phone sex through the takeout intercom. His other new friend is Ace, a janitor at his company who moonlights in a Kiss tribute band that sings everything in French, hence their name, French Kiss. While Bob designs a bestiality-themed game, Jane trains to set a world record for treading water. Mohr has a clever imagination, and this book's elaborate jokes sometimes overdo the cleverness: Schumann, who speaks entirely in football-coach lingo, can be too much of a cartoon. But the story also hinges on some universal issues, namely, Bob’s struggles to rekindle his romance, recapture his creativity and regain control of his life.
To the book’s credit, Mohr never loses the story’s emotional heart.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59376-508-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
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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