A welcome arrival with the promise of good work to come.
Pensive, sometimes-explosive stories of life in the rural Northwest in a debut collection.
A specter hangs over Loskutoff’s stories, that of a rural outback in which the federal government is decidedly an enemy and live fire is exchanged. How you feel about some of his characters (“She was a neighbor, a mother. An American. A widow”) may well depend on your take on such things as the Malheur National Wildlife Reserve and Ruby Ridge; certainly some of Loskutoff’s characters are committed to the idea that they are unwelcome strangers in their own land, if with peculiar ideas about what their own land constitutes. “A friend of mine got shot dead yesterday,” says one character matter-of-factly, adding, “Took seven feds with them.” Perhaps less controversial is Loskutoff’s vision of a place in which nature is very close at hand and the violence attendant is even closer: His characters, particularly men, are often likened to beasts (“Carston made a grunting noise like a wounded animal….He was big enough that he could stomp them both, done real damage, but it wasn’t in him”), and in the troubling opening story, the protagonist, having evidenced some sympathy for a grizzly bear with whom he’s sharing territory, kills a cub and wears its skin as a kind of savage declaration of who’s in charge. Loskutoff acknowledges the guidance of his former writing teacher David Foster Wallace, but there is not much of Wallace’s complex layering (or a single footnote, for that matter) in these tales; instead, the governing tutelary spirit is more on the order of Raymond Carver with a little Bill Kittredge and, particularly in that first story, the early Barry Lopez thrown in for leavening. In any event, Loskutoff writes a good sentence, has a fine eye for the meaningful detail, and spins stories that, while certainly not for every taste, are fully realized.
A welcome arrival with the promise of good work to come.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63558-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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