A sensitive rendering of shattered lives.
The Vietnam War traumatizes a soldier and his family.
In her quietly affecting second novel, playwright, lyricist, and librettist Harrington (Alice Bliss, 2011) returns to upstate New York, the setting of her previous fiction, and to a family grappling with the horrific war injury sustained by their son, Billy. When his helicopter was shot down, Billy alone survived, severely burned. A hospital stay is followed by challenging physical therapy that leaves him despondent, afraid he will never draw again—and drawing is his passion. The bird catalog of the title refers to Billy’s field journals, depicting in precise, brilliant detail the proliferation of birds he observed in woods, lakes, and fields. Drawing birds, he says, became “a doorway, a bridge….It’s how I lived in the world.” The central relationship of the novel is between Billy and his younger sister, Nell, with whom he shares the wonders of nature. Frustrated and powerless to help Billy, Nell watches in despair as he succumbs to drink, depression, and nightmares. Although Billy is a sympathetic character, his traumas are by now familiar in novels and memoirs of the Vietnam War, his distinction being his artistic talent and connection to nature. Yet the natural world that he so deeply loves is being destroyed: Nell documents songbirds’ levels of mercury, a toxin that attacks the birds’ nervous systems, distracting them from sitting on their eggs long enough to hatch. Billy reports on a “rainbow moniker” of chemical agents used in Vietnam; Nell’s father engages in a project to monitor water and soil contamination from pesticides. Subplots focus on Nell’s deepening love for the solid, dependable Harlow, also a survivor of war; and the unsolved disappearance of Nell’s best friend, and Billy’s love, Megan. That mystery underscores Billy’s sense of loss and the community’s fear of being caught in a whirl of uncontrollable events—the war far from home and an unknown threat close by. It is a community, filled with those “suffering in mind, body or spirit.”
A sensitive rendering of shattered lives.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-403-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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