Both a work of social realism and a fable with a moral.
The graphic novel as feminist parable, concerning twin sisters who learn the brutal facts of life, set in New York in the early 1900s.
Jewish daughters of a woman whose reputation makes her an object of scorn on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Esther and Fanya are identical twins and soul mates whose lives take very different turns. Yet they face a common problem in the world they’re poised to enter, and “the root of the problem lies in the overly sexual nature of the human male...It’s men’s drives, you see, that keep Woman reproducing constantly, like a breed cow. Sexual slavery awaits the woman who allows a man to entrap her, either in marriage or in a quick and ugly gutter union.” Such advice is given to Fanya by the female obstetrician she comes to assist in the frequent (but illegal) role as an abortionist. Meanwhile, Esther sees another side of man’s sexual drives, when she falls under the wing of a woman whose burlesque theater serves as a tease for the prostitution business upstairs, with nubile Esther becoming an attraction in first the former, soon the latter and finally something closer to the legitimate theater. (The graphic novel’s title is Yiddish for “Underthings.”) Yet these lines between the worlds of conventional morality and common indecency blur, as the maturing Esther attracts numerous customers who want to take her away and make an honest woman out of her, yet she sees no gain in exchanging the sort of sexual transaction to which she’s accustomed for a less lucrative and potentially more suffocating one. A climactic reunion leads to revelation for the sisters and the reader alike.
Both a work of social realism and a fable with a moral.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4259-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
A slim novel, both in its emotion and construction, set in 1972, centering on a family coming to grips with the death of a son and the closing of their small town’s factory. The Vietnam War is gradually ending and Watergate is heating up, but these two giant events in US history serve only as backdrop to the personal anguish of the MacLeans. When 18-year-old Cory dies in a summer-job mining accident, the family unravels at the loss of their golden boy—blatantly the favorite son, popular, good, and college bound. Cory’s death leaves a hole in the family that older brother Mike and younger brother Stephan feel compelled, yet unable, to fill. The black sheep of the family, Mike drifts from one low-paying job to the next; after work, he spends his time barroom brawling, or fighting with his bitter father. Stephan, still in school, wants to be a musician, although now, with Cory’s passing, he feels the pressure to take the straight and narrow to college, to live out the life that Cory lost. Add to this the disenchantment of parents Bud and Lola, laid off when the bottle factory closed down, and the tale provides fertile ground for examining the failure of the American Dream. This slow-moving effort, however, just scratches the surface, shifting from one landscape-focused event to another, rarely exploring the emotional terror that lurks within each character. Nieman offers some gemlike observations—the desperation of the town slut, holiday shopping at the local department store, Bud’s frustration at being retrained in computers—but she can—t quite sustain a storyline that refuses to progress. The bleak ending, derived from a lack of resolution, is in a sense admirable, and true to the resignation the characters hold for the future; it also reinforces, though, the lack of movement that defines the rest of the narrative. A potentially powerful work that fails itself through lack of focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9657639-6-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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