A delightful, twisty story about storytelling.
A man with an unusual past seeks to solve an offbeat mystery in Ingwalson’s comic novel.
Boblives in Aspenroot,a Rocky Mountain city that’s now the largest urban area in the world, a destination for dreamers and schemers of all sorts. Bob is afraid that his fellow Aspenroot residents don’t like him—including his neighbors, strangers on the bus, and his co-workers at Moo Cow Farms Milk Delivery, where he works as a delivery driver. He decides to throw a party to get to know the people in his neighborhood, and at that get-together, he hears an incredible story from a man who survived the city’s infamous holiday office-party massacre: “Slaughterhouse Aspenroot,” narrates the survivor, a born storyteller. “The Great American Abattoir. Let the devil take the hindmost and a fire eat the rest. One door in, no way out. Forty-six of the forty-eight employees of SuperMeme/Aspenroot and a half-dozen caterers (and the like) punched bloody.” However, a few elements of the tale don’t sit right with Bob, who knows a thing or two about lies, guns, and crime. It starts him off on a quest to uncover a mysterious figure who maybe only exists in his mind but who’s at the heart of the American West: Chatterhat. Ingwalson’s prose is energetic but understated, distracting the reader with low-key digressions and asides only to surprise them with surreal imagery, as when Bob listens to a neighbor’s gossip about people Bob doesn’t know: “ ‘The other day, the Suppervilles, you know them right?’ I make a noncommittal shrug, like who doesn’t know the Suppervilles, right? ‘Yeah, right, there was that whole wife-swapping party rumor? Them. But so they lost their cat the other day.’ ” The novel’s mix of the absurd and the mundane will remind readers of the work of Sam Lipsyte and George Saunders, but Ingwalson manages to strike a hypnotic rhythm of his own. It’s a weird and rambling tale—the kind you hear at a party and don’t fully believe but might find yourself thinking about months and years later.
A delightful, twisty story about storytelling.Pub Date: May 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-57-887857-7
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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