A disturbing and poetic punk-rock version of the classic star-crossed lovers tale.
In the shadow of Hollywood (and their own demons), an unlikely couple fall into a ruinous, all-consuming love affair.
Crosbie’s (Where Did You Sleep Last Night, 2016, etc.) new novel is a trippy, devastating, and blackly comedic look at the true price of love, told from the perspective of Parnell Wilde, an aging, once-famous movie star who now lives in squalor and takes any job he can get—including one involving a chicken suit. Parnell seems likely to go the way of many washed-up actors until he meets Annabel Wrath, a stunning and troubled feminist filmmaker with a cultlike following. Throughout their relationship, pain and pleasure are inextricably woven together. Despite trying to make each other better, Parnell and Annabel seem unable to escape or recover from their painful pasts. One secret in particular wedges them further apart until they reach their disastrous denouement. At one point, Parnell says, “We are the happiest right now, I think, pushing a pin through the moment as it passes into memory and is leached of color and sound.” Even their best moments are tinged with sadness and relegated to the past. Crosbie’s writing, while not for everyone, is both lucid and lurid. In her experimental, art house–esque style, intrigue, horror, and compassion coexist. Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange hangs over the novel like a shroud, and the book often feels like an acid trip or fever dream full of bright colors, dizzying violence, and warped timelines. Details are hard to hold onto because Parnell is a wildly unreliable narrator with what he describes as “selective amnesia.” While jarring, the gap-filled narrative successfully portrays an addled man ruined by love and fame. The ending, which feels both inevitable and slightly disappointing, stays true to the novel’s painful yet spirited tone.
A disturbing and poetic punk-rock version of the classic star-crossed lovers tale.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4870-0286-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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