Despite a spirit of dyspeptic, mean-spirited fun, ultimately this is exhausting and one-note.
A middle-aged grandmother named Barbara—alone, friendless, adrift and in a foaming rage that lasts from first page to last—embarks on a series of lacerating rants and escalating misadventures.
Shakin (The Cure for Sodomy, 2006, etc.) begins butchering bourgeois conventions on the first page. Drunk at a party hosted by her daughter, Barbara gives a sip of martini to her five-year-old grandson, that “small leaky creature who simply refuses to leave her alone no matter how much she tells him to piss off.” She flirts lingeringly with a French waiter, gets him fired, then goes home with this “smelliest man alive” for a night of restorative sex. Soon she decamps from the suburbs to a new apartment in the city. Eventually, a depleted store of gin and a broken vibrator make her emerge in search of sustenance for liver and loins. There’s unlimited gin, a meteoric rise as a singer in a drag karaoke bar, an interlude with an enthusiastic Brazilian plumber with an anal fixation, a love affair of sorts with a poet on methadone whom she has to ply with heroin in order to make him capable of consummation…and the beat—or the beat-down—goes on. There are pungently funny bits: Of one character it is said, “She decides he’s not gay, just very poetic.” Shakin also provides some delectably bitter aphorisms: “Watching TV all the time makes you clinically inane.” Grandma’s aggressive cynicism could work if there were vulnerability underneath, but there’s not much. Eventually this buzz saw of a novel runs out of sacred cows and turns the blades on itself.
Despite a spirit of dyspeptic, mean-spirited fun, ultimately this is exhausting and one-note.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57962-163-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party. The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising. But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party. Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.Pub Date: June 13, 1949
ISBN: 0452284236
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1949
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Will simultaneously intrigue both romantics and skeptics. The science might oversimplify, but it’s gripping enough to read...
Marrs’ debut novel traces the stories of five people who find their soul mates—or do they?
Imagine if you could submit to a simple DNA test and then receive your Match in your email. Not just an online date who might be geographically compatible, but a true and unique genetically destined partner. While the potential long-term benefits may seem to outweigh the negative consequences, the system is far from infallible; as any science-fiction fan could tell you, if it sounds too good to be true, there’s usually a catastrophe lurking at the other end. Marrs’ novel traces five individuals who meet their Matches under varying circumstances and with widely conflicting outcomes. During the course of their romantic adventures (and misadventures), the entire DNA matching algorithm will prove to be susceptible to hacking, also proving that (gasp!) just because something may be driven by science doesn’t mean that it’s free from the world of human error. The philosophy posed by the novel speaks not just to the power of love and the laws of attraction, but also serves as a commentary on today’s world of genetic exploration. Do these breakthroughs simplify our lives, or do they make us lazy, replacing the idea of “destiny” or “fate” with “science” as a larger power that we don’t need to question? These ideas keep the novel moving along and create a deeper level of interest, since most of the narrative threads are fairly predictable. The two exceptions are the psychopathic serial killer who meets his Match and begins to lose interest in killing and the heterosexual man matched with another man, both of whom must then redefine sexuality and love, commitment and family.
Will simultaneously intrigue both romantics and skeptics. The science might oversimplify, but it’s gripping enough to read all in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-00510-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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