A brilliantly written but uneven and sometimes aimless saga of dysfunction.
A young woman works through psychosexual trauma with lurid excess and much introspection in this sprawling debut novel.
Nesbitt, a poet and fiction writer, tells the story of June Barrett, a woman in her 20s in Reagan-era Chicago who undergoes several drastic changes in lifestyle and persona. She begins as the wife of up-and-coming young architect Cam as they settle into a well-heeled yuppiehood. Cracks soon appear in their facade: Cam begins castigating June for supposed hookups but also pressures her to start swinging with two other couples. When he develops a cocaine addiction, he grows controlling and even violent, prodding June to consider leaving the marriage. She does that with a vengeance in the novel’s second part, working as a prostitute under the name Reni. Her life becomes a picaresque of tawdry “dates” and bachelor parties, described in graphic but prosaic detail, and she dabbles in check fraud, booze, and drugs. Part three shifts gears again, with Reni moving out of prostitution and, as Sandy, into a giddy lesbian live-in relationship with a Vietnamese-American artist named Mary Colleen “Coolly” Shea. Their seemingly sparkling romance darkens into paranoia, abandonment, and a downward spiral that ends with Sandy sinking into a coma after she is run over by a bus. The complex narrative intercuts Sandy and Coolly’s story with scenes of Sandy/June in the hospital struggling with rehab and pondering her fraught family history of abuse. Nesbitt weaves a Joycean tapestry in the novel’s 502 pages, replacing Dublin with an atmospheric, sometimes nightmarish Chicago stocked with sharply observed characters, from a gay antiques shop owner to a motherly diner waitress, all surrounded by the labyrinthine ruminations and memories of June and her alter-egos. The author is a superb writer with a fine ear for dialogue, an eye for setting and behavior, and a talent for lyrical prose that’s evocative and sensual even when it’s abstract. (“Hope was not an obsidian mountain to be scaled, not a bog of sewage to be drowning in, but the melted snow of a river rushing with abandon into a clear vernal pool; I could find inordinate joy in grocery bag dresses tied with jump rope; I could tell boys I wasn’t afraid of worms.”) Unfortunately, the story often seems thin and disjointed; while the changes June endures are heavily foreshadowed, they don’t feel well motivated. The June-Cam plot bogs down in décor (“I learned quickly…to marry style periods…like the leather couches Cam wanted for the living room with the Art Nouveau sofa table I found”). They seem like a mismatched couple whose breakup is more a relief than a tragedy. Reni’s odyssey as a prostitute is the book’s best part; her adventures merit the author’s literary flair and have an invigorating thread of grotesque comedy. (“Hello, bay-be. Rest that hand now, reinforcements have arrived,” declares Reni’s brassy partner Kay upon meeting a sad-sack client.) Part Three’s Sandy-Coolly romance is unconvincing, sunny, and blissful until it’s not. Throughout the volume run intermittent meditations on June’s childhood and family relationships, which seem unpleasant but only mildly dysfunctional—and not very gripping—until fragmented revelations gel toward the tale’s end. As disturbing as they are, they come too late to weld June’s/Reni’s/Sandy’s experiences into a dramatic whole.
A brilliantly written but uneven and sometimes aimless saga of dysfunction.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-5970-3
Page Count: 524
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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