British author Graham’s sixth novel, but first US appearance, covers all the usual bases of matinee fiction, from abusive...
A decades-long chronicle of friendship among five not terribly likable Americans and one Brit who meet while the Americans’ pilot husbands are stationed in 1952 England.
Peggy, resentful but dutiful wife of Vern and mother to Crystal, narrates with a semiliterate Texas twang that is not only irritating but indistinguishable from the voices of her friends, including Brooklyn-born Lois and midwestern Audrey. Betty, also from Texas, is the most domestic of the bunch (even though she’s married to the wife-beater). Lois drinks and cheats on her dopey but sweet husband Herb. Gayle just drinks, especially after she loses not one but two husbands to military deaths. Audrey is criticized for sucking up, probably because her husband, unlike the others, actually succeeds in his ambitions. But all are amazingly dimwitted, almost caricatures of ignorant Americans, arrogant toward their British hosts. The local Norfolk woman, Kath, with whom they strike up a friendship lives in abject poverty but shows a spark the others lack. The loose plot follows the women from 1950s England to 1990s America as husbands drop out of the service and marriages flounder or dissolve. Restive Lois stays with her saintly Herb and becomes a devoted grandmother. Gayle ends up a rich TV evangelist. Audrey is widowed when her high-ranking husband chokes on a piece of meat. And Kath completely turns her life around, opening a driving school with money she receives after a flood destroys her childhood home. When her marriage fizzles, Peggy becomes a wedding planner, though her newfound and exquisite taste is hard to believe. Betty turns more complicated and more interesting than the others as her upbeat approach, annoyingly rose-colored at first, takes on a feisty dignity after she leaves her husband and struggles, with limited success, to raise her three daughters alone.
British author Graham’s sixth novel, but first US appearance, covers all the usual bases of matinee fiction, from abusive husbands to death by cancer, plus (minimal) sex and a smattering of recipes.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-67936-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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