McMurtry (The Last Picture Show) has perhaps attempted the impossible: he's portraying today's Hollywood, from the inside, in all its glossy ugliness, while at the same time trying to coax from that milieu some tenderness, some equivalent for the dead nostalgia of old-time Hollywood. And in the first third of this novel, it seems that he's truly succeeding—as 63-year-old hack screenwriter Joe Percy tells how he went to New York with hot new director Jill Peel for the opening of her film. Widower Joe is fat and often drunk, but he's also a "proficient adulterer" involved with gorgeous young wives of studio biggies. Still, he's willing to leave his latest flame behind in L.A. and keep Jill company; though 37 and attractive and a seasoned pro, she's childishly awkward and scared of the looming threat of fame. All of this works brilliantly, with Joe's satiric edge driving ever forward; the scenes in N.Y. may become cartoony (a press conference with artsily sophomoric critics, a fracas at Elaine's), but the texture of Jill and Joe's prickly fondness against the vacant crassness of the film biz is a tragicomic triumph. Then, however, the narration is picked up by Owen Oarson, the new lover that Jill acquires on that N.Y. trip, a dumb cynic and renowned stud who's using Jill to further his own career as a producer. Maybe he also loves her, sort of, but the fight-and-make-up affair between faithful Jill and promiscuous Owen—most of the rest of the book—never quite clicks, not even when Jill herself becomes the narrator. Happily, the focus does finally return to Jill and Joe (who is a dying man after a stroke): they join a grossly raunchy pair of Texan screenwriters on a gloriously pathetic caper, stealing the soundtrack of Jill's unreleased new film (the powerful star is butcher-editing it) and careening around Texas. If, however, McMurtry can't quite illuminate Jill's romantic waywardness, he zeroes in acutely on each character's romance with the film industry: Jill's doomed passion for it, Joe's surly affection for it, Owen's rape of it and by it. On location in Rome, at Hollywood parties (Jill watches a Daimation eat a huge block of caviar), at business lunches—the details and dropped names ring true, the dialogue crackles, and the characters glow. And, perhaps most remarkably of all, McMurtry has adopted the relentless four-letter-worded vocabulary and groinal preoccupations of Hollywood without surrendering some intangible thread of clean-hearted decency—just one of the elusive charms that make this imperfect but lovable book the closest thing to the New Hollywood novel to come along so far.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0684853892
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1978
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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