A lightly likable depiction of an ill-fated American master. Mind the credibility gap.
A fictional imagining of the troubled life of John Kennedy Toole and the selling of his Pulitzer-winning novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.
Toole's story is well-known via biographies and appreciations of Dunces, published more than a decade after his suicide in 1969 at the age of 31. Claiming in their introductory note that personal details of the artist's life proved too elusive for a standard biography, the co-writers have fashioned a novel of their own about the man called Kenny. At once a shy, lonely person and a "gifted mimic" who enjoys mocking people, he is controlled by his mother, Thelma, who restricts her talented son from normal boyhood activities and accompanies him on his dates with a girl he can't kiss in his mom's presence. Though even in death Kenny is not free of Thelma's helicopter presence—her pestering salesmanship led to his obsessed-over book's publication—he mostly succeeds as an instructor at Columbia University and other schools. His pivotal moment comes when Simon & Schuster editor Robert Gottlieb, while finding much to recommend Dunces, rejects it. His dream destroyed, Kenny slowly sinks into mental illness, ultimately fixating on his fictional alter ego, "instigator extraordinaire" Ignatius T. Reilly, as an actual person. As editor-in-chief at Grove Press, Carroll was instrumental in foisting the bestselling paperback edition of Dunces on the world. He himself is a character in this entertaining if oddly assembled book, which features a made-up journalist who becomes obsessed with Toole's story. While the authors do their best to capture their subject in all his eccentricities, their attempt to approximate his interior voice is pure folly. And their failure to provide a basic plot summary or excerpts from Dunces is puzzling.
A lightly likable depiction of an ill-fated American master. Mind the credibility gap.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-193-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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