Overworked, but worth a read for its rough, raw and luridly realistic portrayal of inner-city strife.
Race relations and social upheaval permeate this frenetic novel set amid the 1992 trial of Los Angeles police officers accused of beating motorist Rodney King.
Baldwin parlays his real-life experiences teaching Southern Californian inner-city high-school students into his thorny, complicated, character-driven debut that follows a group of interconnected middle-class denizens through the urban underbelly of L.A. It’s 1992 and the crackle of gunfire is the norm to a crime-ridden area anxiously awaiting the verdict in the King trial. Besides white, ex-vice cop Michael Macetti, also struggling among the gangbangers and thieving thugs is local schoolteacher Olivia who is frustrated with her laid-off, drug-running husband Gunther, while Marcetti’s daughter, Sonja, an artistic high school senior, is torn between her interracial love affair with Anwar, Gunther’s straight-A son, and her affection for Bobby, the jock she left behind in La Jolla. Tensions mount when Kesha, a young teen, becomes the victim of a drive-by shooting at a local crack house run by the Crips gang that has been incrementally encroaching on Macetti’s neighborhood, making Gunther, a member of rival gang the Bloods, more vigilant about reclaiming his turf. Meanwhile, Sonia’s classmate Ishmael forms a deadly allegiance to Crips leader Rayhab, who is bent on revenge-killing Macetti. In Baldwin’s dark world of urban decay, the male characters tend to deliver the terse language, threats and violence while their female counterparts offer support and hope, yet exasperatingly spin in place. Macetti struggles to become the hero the story desperately needs, but his efforts are quickly trumped by a surfeit of menacing gang activity. Nevertheless, Baldwin’s bleak melodrama plods on, becoming hinged on the King verdict. When the verdict finally arrives, it throws the entire city into a tailspin of riots, looting, murder and uncontrollable mayhem, further exacerbating racial tensions and general desperation, which, depending on the reader, will either titillate or exhaust. Baldwin has assembled an edgy cast of characters that’s ambitiously broad and, with a few exceptions, richly realized. As slangy dialogue intensifies the relentlessly grim and aggressive plot, Baldwin thankfully allows for a few slivers of hope, such as Olivia’s defining sentiment to her friends early on that “faith is about all we’ve got.”
Overworked, but worth a read for its rough, raw and luridly realistic portrayal of inner-city strife.Pub Date: May 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460970782
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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