Brooklyn writer Mancusi's revelatory novel is a drug tale with a difference—even the chase scenes are philosophical.
California philosophy professor Oscar Boatwright has his notions of free will severely tested when he's seduced by a self-possessed student named Dawn who involves him in a dangerous drug-dealing scheme.
It's not an auspicious time for Oscar. His mother died during a flight from Hawaii, where she was paying secret visits to a self-help guru who took all of her family savings, and left her husband, Oscar's father, high and dry. After Oscar drunkenly sleeps with Dawn, not knowing she's his student until he spots her in class the next Monday, he's worried the hookup will cost him his job. But after Dawn blackmails him into retrieving a backpack of drugs from Mexico, the professor (who is 29 but seems older) is most worried about staying alive. His fears are justified when he's captured by Mexican drug smugglers whose leader calmly tells him he has had women and children killed and Oscar is next. What would Schopenhauer say? Oscar, who believes the script for his life has already been written and he is merely acting it out, struggles "to think of some evidence...that the essence of existence was not suffering." Good luck with that: With the exception of his unlikely romance with Dawn, life is one wild misadventure after another for Oscar. That includes his hopeless pursuit of the shady self-help character, whose videos, he discovers, are not entirely without worth. For all its edgy, downbeat humor, the novel inspires a deep emotional investment in Oscar. The big existential questions that get asked are brilliantly framed by his antics. The payoff is, dare we say it, profound.
Brooklyn writer Mancusi's revelatory novel is a drug tale with a difference—even the chase scenes are philosophical.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-93066-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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