In The Warrior Woman (1976) and China Men (1980), Kingston approached the genius of the Chinese-American heritage in a robust blaze of mythic intuitions and shrewd, historical, autobiographical notation. Here, in her first novel, she swirls stories from myth and wild circumstance about the Sixties' soul-journey of a recent Berkeley grad of Chinese ancestry—as he pads about the S.F. environs on Steppenwolfian, jumpy paws, experiencing Vietnam-era Fear and Loathing, love and friendship, and the creative bangs and shudders of a poet. He'll finally bring to birth "an enormous loud play. . .that will make us [Chinese-Americans] braver. . ." On the way to reawakening the Chinese soul via the great show, Wittman Ah Sing, fired from a department store (something naughty went on in Toys), parties (sans drugs) with inventively seeking pals and strenuously experiencing LSD heads; falls in love ("she likes me, a heartbreaker and a rover"); gets married (sort of), but the two may not love; visits satisfyingly mad parents; confronts the Government at the Unemployment Office; and at last casts his theatrical epic with a cast of Wittman's everybody (after all, "it takes enormous populations to play out all the ways of being human"). Among the cast: a Japanese friend and his Young Millionairess; the wife Wittman may not love and the beautiful girl he may; mother Ruby and her showgirl pals who'll perform again their (WW II) War Bonds China Rescue act; "old futs"; PoPo, the luck-crowned deserted grandmother; and a cast of neighborhood thousands. At the first night close (the play is continuous, night after night) of story, music, and dance, Wittman—in a fiery monologue—blasts the "innocent" ones who won't recognize other Americans in their native land ("We need to take the hyphen out. . .'American' the noun and 'Chinese' the adjective"). There are some enchanting turns here (a boring girl becomes a "blue boar" in a twinkling—" the lips moved, the tusks flashed"); and throughout Kingston offers bright-bannered "talk stories" of heroes and monsters, the grand and gruesome. But trips inside the head of a heavy experiencer and fantasizer can create a static, claustrophobic climate. As for Wittman's ethnic-pride orations—right on! (though better said than read). Rather a dense, occasionally rewarding trip, which should ride comfortably on the excellence of Kingston's nonfiction.
Pub Date: April 27, 1989
ISBN: 0679727892
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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