Acker (My Mother: Demonology, 1993, etc.) continues her dizzying experiments in fiction—her dream narratives with their loose structure and shifting pronouns—and again punctuates her prose with the same tired insights on sex, class, and politics. The story goes something like this: ``O'' is searching ``for who she could be,'' and discovers pleasure while watching others have sex. Artaud (the mad poet who's one of Acker's usual suspects) speaks to O of suicide, a ``protest against control.'' O, of Moroccan-Jewish descent, joins a whorehouse in Alexandria, where Lulu and Ange introduce her to dildos and masturbation. She then has a long dream about menstruating in public, after which she and Ange begin their search for buried treasure. In a Brighton pub, she joins with the Pirate Girls (Slut Girl, Brat Rat, Bad Dog, Kiss-of- Rot) and their leader, Pussycat, for whom O longs. The treasure, once discovered, has its origin in the myth of Pandora and her box, which, here, fits nicely with Acker's obsession with vaginal odors. Acker's pirate scenes resemble more the gross-out caricatures of underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson than anything from Robert Louis Stevenson. She seems most comfortable importing her familiar culture heroes: Baudelaire, Nerval, Pasolini, and others. Meanwhile, her interest in bodily fluids persists, as does her thematic concern with incest, whoredom, cross-gendering, and death. In Acker's tiresome world, homeless people, masturbation, body piercing, and S&M are good; patriarchy, rationality, and morality are bad. Thus extend the subtleties of her imagination. For someone so engaged in experimenting with language, Acker commands a drab vocabulary and limited range of discourse. Some nice sacrilegious images will please the armchair rebels among her readers.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8021-1578-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.
Catch-22 is an unusual, wildly inventive comic novel about World War II, and its publishers are planning considerable publicity for it.
Set on the tiny island of Pianosa in the Mediterranean Sea, the novel is devoted to a long series of impossible, illogical adventures engaged in by the members of the 256th bombing squadron, an unlikely combat group whose fanatical commander, Colonel Cathcart, keeps increasing the men's quota of missions until they reach the ridiculous figure of 80. The book's central character is Captain Yossarian, the squadron's lead bombardier, who is surrounded at all times by the ironic and incomprehensible and who directs all his energies towards evading his odd role in the war. His companions are an even more peculiar lot: Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who loved to win parades; Major Major Major, the victim of a life-long series of practical jokes, beginning with his name; the mess officer, Milo Minderbinder, who built a food syndicate into an international cartel; and Major de Coverley whose mission in life was to rent apartments for the officers and enlisted men during their rest leaves. Eventually, after Cathcart has exterminated nearly all of Yossarian's buddies through the suicidal missions, Yossarian decides to desert — and he succeeds.
Catch-22 is also concerned with some of war's horrors and atrocities, and it is at times painfully grim.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1961
ISBN: 0684833395
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1961
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