A defiant young woman in near-future America is sentenced to hard time in the 1950s Midwest.
Oates (A Book of American Martyrs, 2017, etc.) needn’t mention Donald Trump to make the target of this dark allegory clear. The United States has become a repressive regime that’s run by oligarchs, ranks its citizenry by skin tone, and “vaporizes” dissenters. The narrator, Adriane, is set to graduate high school as valedictorian until it’s discovered that her speech is filled with impertinent questions. (Like, say, Why does America fight so many wars?) Found guilty of “Treason and Questioning of Authority,” Adriane is sentenced to a re-education camp: a women’s college in central Wisconsin in 1959, eight decades in the past. (The nature of time-travel technology is initially vague, which makes for a potent late plot twist.) Given a new identity, Adriane is expected to be an Eisenhower-era good girl and not make a fuss. “I would be the ideal student—the ideal ‘coed,’ ” she writes. “I would never betray or even feel the mildest curiosity.” As in any good prison-break story, though, her compliance doesn’t last long: She finds common cause with a psychology professor who she suspects has been similarly exiled. Oates takes some pleasure in imagining Adriane’s culture shock: women fussing over their hair, bafflement about books on paper. But the overall mood is somber, stressing the point that the era those MAGA hats suggest was so great was often oppressive and mean-spirited, particularly toward women. Oates dwells much, sometimes ponderously so, on B.F. Skinner’s then-popular concept of behaviorism, which slotted humans as dim machines lacking in free will. And Oates’ late style, thick with em dashes and exclamatory prose, flirts with melodrama. But forgivably so: Are we not living in emotionally demanding times?
More shambling than dystopian classics by Orwell, Atwood, and Ishiguro but energized by a similar spirit of outrage.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-231959-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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