Debut novelist Mockett’s portrayal of everyday life in Japan is engrossing, but the passivity of her protagonists belies her...
A piano prodigy, daughter of a Japanese outcast, flees motherhood but can’t escape pursuit by her American offspring.
Akiko runs a bar in a country town in postwar Japan. Her daughter Satomi’s father is unknown but rumored to be a foreigner. That, and the bar’s popularity with the town’s men, causes the locals to shun mother and daughter. When Satomi wins a piano competition, Akiko marries a prosperous fisherman to finance her daughter’s musical education. While studying at a prestigious Tokyo conservatory, Satomi grows fond of a young man named Masayoshi. Fearing marriage will interfere with Satomi’s concert career, Akiko discourages Masayoshi from proposing. The disappointed suitor becomes a Buddhist monk and ultimately gets his own temple in Akita to the north. Satomi goes to Paris, where her musical zeal gives way to passion for Timothy, a rakish American antique importer and occasional smuggler. Helping Timothy scout artifacts in Japan, Satomi learns of her mother’s death. She attends Akiko’s obsequies at Masayoshi’s temple, where, not entirely by chance, she encounters Francois, another crooked Asian antique purveyor. Timothy is arrested in Tokyo and imprisoned. Disowned by her stepfamily, Satomi has no choice but to accompany Francois to California, where she’s exploited as his underpaid antique authenticator and mistress. When Satomi gives birth to Rumi, she feels trapped and, on impulse, walks away from San Francisco and her infant. Francois raises Rumi, who soon evinces a collector’s clairvoyance: objects tell her whether they’re genuine or fake. She’s haunted by the haggard ghost of a woman she assumes is the mother Francois has told her is dead. When Rumi discovers a morbid maternal memento secreted with Francois’ hot merchandise, she heads for Japan, where Masayoshi holds the key to Satomi’s whereabouts.
Debut novelist Mockett’s portrayal of everyday life in Japan is engrossing, but the passivity of her protagonists belies her intent to demonstrate how talented women defy domestic constraints.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55597-541-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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