The bare bones here could have become nothing more than a twentysomething melodrama, but McKinnon brings to it the...
A self-consciously literary but perceptive and well-paced first outing about the relationships among a handful of self-absorbed East Village hipsters.
Dreaming of the day her work will be at MoMA, Becky, an ambitious and talented collagist, prepares for her first solo show in her apartment off Avenue A. On hand are Hugh, an old flame visiting from San Francisco; Dahlia, a sometime dancer and full-time rich kid, currently Becky’s best friend; and, Max, a vain and seductive actor, invited by Dahlia despite Becky’s protests. Dahlia has decided that Becky’s opening is an opportunity to demonstrate to one other person, the wildly dramatic femme fatale Callie, that the four of them—each at one time involved with, in love with, betrayed by, and/or obsessed with Callie—have moved on and are better off without her. Leading up to the opening, McKinnon recalls the group’s past, then proceeds in present time as Callie pursues Becky’s friendship and exploits her weaknesses; Callie cheats on Hugh with Max; Callie seduces Dahlia, then rejects her, then tells Becky it was her she wanted all along. Initially intrusive, McKinnon’s arty prose style—no quotes for dialogue, no paragraph breaks between speakers, adjectival constructs like “speechimpedimented”—is ultimately well suited to the exploration of self-deception and self-justification. In the climactic scene, Callie, finally onstage, discovers that Becky has turned the most vulnerable moment of her past into art. In a whiplash-fast reinterpretation, we see that emotionally manipulative Callie (her combined suicide attempt/art vandalism is masterful) has been outmaneuvered by the heretofore apparently put-upon Becky, revealed now as a (to the author’s credit, still-sympathetic) monster of ambition.
The bare bones here could have become nothing more than a twentysomething melodrama, but McKinnon brings to it the breathtaking, self-important, urgency of youth, along with insight into the mind of the hungry artist. A gripping, revealing, entertaining debut.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-29058-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.
The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-92721-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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