Idiosyncratic, controversial, and eminently readable: a masterwork of alternative history.
An acerbic, brilliant history of the age of AIDS spills over into a second overstuffed, antic volume.
Screenwriter, playwright, and gay activist Kramer’s sprawling novel is narrated by an omniscient “Roving Historian,” but a killing virus has an ample voice, too: Four sentences in, it says, gamely, “I, too, am glad you’ve come back to learn more about my taking over the world.” But what to call it? Learned scientists, many of them ex-Nazis, have settled on “Underlying Condition,” having rejected “Fairy Flu,” “Gay Cancer,” and “An Unidentified Fatal Male Malady,” names popular among the malevolent straights—but, even so, “UC” doesn’t please the gay population, either, “which might be thought to like the name for the very reason that others don’t.” Daniel Jerusalem will learn just how ill-willed the majority can be. At the beginning of the novel, his twin, David, is working in a gay brothel established by none other than J. Edgar Hoover in order to entrap and blackmail its clients; Daniel, meanwhile, is embarking on a medical career that will find him teasing out the virus. Early on, Daniel is smitten by a budding writer named Fred Lemish, who shares the attraction, knowing that “they both belong to a people the House of Representatives doesn’t want to see at all.” With a Joseph Heller–like satirical sweep full of goofy names and unlikely situations, Kramer examines the kinky sex lives of presidents and politicians, one in particular, Peter Ruester and his “wretched Lady Macbeth,” clearly meant to invoke the dreaded Reagans. Not far in the wings is Mordecai Masturbov, a soft-porn mogul who echoes Hugh Hefner, while down the road awaits Dereck Dumster (guess who?), another president whose judicial appointments “are filled with hatred for almost everything.” Gay and straight worlds collide, as Kramer chronicles, but never align: Though the book is a flawless exercise in black humor, it is also filled with righteous anger—and, as each page indicates, not without good reason.
Idiosyncratic, controversial, and eminently readable: a masterwork of alternative history.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-10413-9
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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