Broad, cautionary anti-gun SF (sort of a Fahrenheit .451 Caliber); plays best to the already converted.
In Roberts’ dystopian novel, a diplomat in a North America of the far future explores a pariah continent, where descendants of the defunct U.S. concentrate their stern religious faith around firearms and death.
Debut author Roberts’ SF volley against America’s obsession with guns and the Second Amendment happens in the 2600s. Ex–North America is a “backwater where no one goes,” little remembered and unmourned. What’s left are scattered communities with electricity, industry, running water, crops, and trade but no national cohesion or ties to the outside world. The rest of the planet has advanced to a cosmopolitan civilization from which diplomat Ishwar Dhoni, punished for a personal indiscretion, is exiled. He is reassigned to an American coastal fortress maintained by “Earth Administration” in a long-standing quarantine. The narrative—split between Ishwar’s debriefings and the rustic inhabitants of a certain Paradise Valley—informs readers that toxic U.S. gun mania ran riot in the 21st century, with weapons lobbyists and ultraconservatives subverting Congress, stifling the media, and arming militias. School shootings became routine, and armed gangs, flaunting their firepower, raided and robbed until even the U.S. government (relocated to Salt Lake City) fell. Once special commandos of the unified Earth extinguished America’s nuclear arsenal in surgical raids, the rest of humanity shunned the continent. Now its villages worship “Nar,” an Aryan-blond messiah said to have brought guns directly from God in heaven, and random schoolchildren are massacred in a “Shady Hook” festival. Ishwar and a history-minded cohort/lover investigate, among other things, a cult’s murky origins in the family of the last U.S. president, who was named...Heston. That’s one of the few outwardly humorous touches in an otherwise sober narrative that treats the outrageous premise in deadpan The Handmaid’s Tale manner (though Roberts is cheeky enough to include himself as one of the few future academics to comment on the gun-pocalypse). Some juicy targets hit: right-wing populist paranoia and manipulation of history for power’s sake. But repeatedly falling back on a simplistic guns-are-bad theme minus deeper insights into American pathologies makes for a light-caliber attack, much as gun fanaticism well deserves a pistol-whipping.
Broad, cautionary anti-gun SF (sort of a Fahrenheit .451 Caliber); plays best to the already converted.Pub Date: April 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4809-9025-8
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Dorrance Pub Co
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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