An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.
A woman is detained under an American regime where even dreams are being surveilled.
Lalami’s stellar fifth novel concerns Sara Hussein, a Moroccan American woman who’s returning home from a conference in London to her family in L.A. when she’s held by the Risk Assessment Administration, a federal agency that uses biometric data to assess citizens’ “pre-crime” tendencies. She’s done nothing troubling, but her “risk score” is high enough to force a stay at an all-woman “retention center” that’s effectively a prison. Though her stay is supposed to be brief, the smallest hiccups lead to extensions, and the private-prison firm contracted by RAA charges extortionate rates for everything from emails to clean sheets; Sara and the other retainees are also expected to work to lower their scores, labor that partly involves feeding AI models. There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here—as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events, and Sara plots a similar small-scale resistance. But Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined—interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped. (Not for nothing does she have a Borges book checked out of the library.) And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought. It’s a fiction-workshop cliche that dreams are unnecessary, but here they play a crucial role in the plot, opening up questions of what we’re sacrificing in the name of convenience and safety. The novel’s striking message is summarized in Sara’s retort to a bureaucrat who tells her the data doesn’t lie: “It doesn’t tell the truth, either.”
An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317600
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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