With bleak humor and sharp details, Brown memorably connects the personal and the political.
An emotionally complex story of grief, desire, and Brexit.
When this comedy of manners opens, it’s early 2016. Narrator Paul lives in London, where he shares an apartment with several friends. He works part-time in a bookstore and has a semisteady gig writing two columns for a pop-culture magazine called White Jesus: one on books and one where he reviews haircuts. It’s through this work that he interviews a somewhat reclusive novelist named Emily Nardini, with whom he quickly becomes smitten. Complicating things is the presence of Emily’s public-intellectual boyfriend, Andrew Lancaster, and the likelihood that Paul’s feelings for Emily are unrequited. That’s not the only area in which Paul’s life is complicated: There’s also the matter of his sister, Amy, who has been absent from his life since they had an argument following the death of their mother. Paul and Amy hail from a working-class community on the northwest coast of England, and the tension between urban and rural areas that came to the foreground in the Brexit vote is a very real presence in his life. Paul’s occasionally acerbic narration makes for a memorable narrative voice, and Brown (My Biggest Lie, 2014) pulls off the tricky feat of creating a protagonist who teeters on the border of misanthropic and self-loathing without making him unbearable. Along the way, Brown ponders questions of class and art, creating a memorable supporting cast whose beliefs often come into conflict, leading to numerous barbed exchanges. Looming over much of the novel are Paul and Amy’s efforts to sell their late mother’s house, which connects them to a place about which they feel conflicted emotions.
With bleak humor and sharp details, Brown memorably connects the personal and the political.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-911508-58-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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