An endearing, bittersweet romance that reads like a comedy.
Loser tailor seeks woman willing to subjugate herself and deal with his multitude of issues.
In his last outing (The Locklear Letters, 2003), Kun seemed to have an unerring eye for those lost men of the world who pine away for their perfect fantasy women. In this sharper and edgier riff on a similar type, he takes us into the world of Hamilton “Ham” Ashe. Hailing from a small Georgia town, Ham now works as a tailor in Atlanta (having a little boating knowledge, he answered a misspelled ad looking for a “sailor” but got hired anyway), while his live-in girlfriend, Renee, who recently lost her job at a hospital, does nothing. The bulk of the story is a nonstop rant by Ham against Renee and the horrors she inflicts upon him, mostly of the monetary variety. Deciding that she doesn’t want to go back to work, Renee announces her desire to become a country-and-western singer, necessitating the purchase of a guitar, guitar lessons, and some really awful outfits to accompany her horrible songs. Ham takes it all in silent resentment, occasionally flashing back to memories of his ex-wife Shellie, who hailed from the same small town as he. Other memories, of a kid from Ham’s high school who was brutally murdered, also come floating back to prove a crucial development in the story (it’s not what readers might think—this doesn’t turn into a crime novel—but it’s shocking nonetheless). For a time, Ham’s rantings are amusing as Renee goes from one ridiculous type of selfish behavior to another, but as we see more of Ham’s dead-end life, the more sympathetic she becomes. Things at first seem suffused with the sour taste of misogyny, like a standup comic going on endlessly about his crazy girlfriend, but ultimately Kun proves an abler writer than that.
An endearing, bittersweet romance that reads like a comedy.Pub Date: June 15, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-69-9
Page Count: 350
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
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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