A thoughtful, subtly structured exploration of fame and its discontents.
An unnamed 22-year-old pop star looks back over a decade in the spotlight and grapples with his family history.
Near the end of this tautly written debut novel, structured as its narrator’s memoir, he muses on his pop-culture ubiquity. “Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is what it would be like to read this book if you’d never heard of me before,” he writes. It’s a slightly self-conscious touch, but it’s also understandable: This musician at times feels like a recognizable composite of a number of 21st-century singers. The narrator’s relationship with his mentor, a writer named Bob Winstock with some bigoted remarks in his past, is particularly evocative of some of the more contentious aspects of Justin Bieber’s public persona. Structurally, the novel is more subtle than it first appears: It begins in celebrity tell-all mode, with the narrator discussing the loss of his virginity and observing that “it’s actually kind of hard for me to remember anything that happened in my life before I was famous.” But the narrator reveals himself to be more empathic than he seems, yearning for a kind of self-knowledge that he’s never developed the tools to manage and clearly frustrated in ways he can’t articulate by his parents’ divorce and his father’s suicide. It’s a tricky voice to pull off, and Kuritzkes occasionally overdoes some affectations of immaturity. A long subplot involving Oddvar, a scientist helping to maintain a seed vault in Svalbard, resolves ambiguously; it’s unclear if the narrator is unknowingly convincing Oddvar to leave work benefitting the planet for something more ephemeral or if Oddvar himself is unsure of what he wants. But overall, this novel emerges in a less satirical, more humanistic place than it begins.
A thoughtful, subtly structured exploration of fame and its discontents.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30902-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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