Hijuelos's fluency—whether seamlessly singing the sad ballad of a family harrowed by madness and displacement in his first novel, Our House in the Last World (1985), or the slightly happier, warmer, more infectious up-tempo one of the Pulitzer-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989)—is his signature, and here he gives it a very, very long solo in a family chronicle that follows a huge Irish-Cuban family across the span of a century. The very title here speaks of muchness, and muchness is delivered—but much, disappointingly, about very little. The eponymous brother is a 1950's B-movie actor who hits the rocks, a pattern of modest success without hope of permanence that began with his Irish-born photographer father and Cuban poetess mother. The Montez O'Briens grow up in a small Pennsylvania town, and Hijuelos follows them out and back—to Cuba, New York, Hollywood, Alaska, Ireland—as they make do individually and together. But as often imperils such a feckless, loose-woven, overly charactered book, Hijuelos pretty quickly gives up trying to invest each sibling with the same detailed attention, focusing instead on the patrician eldest sister, Margarita—a woman of innate dignity and poise—and leaving the rest to serve as mere counterpoints. What Hijuelos seems to want to do more intently is write lyrically, and he does. Sometimes it's good lyricism—as in Mambo Kings, Hijuelos writes about sex with just the right amount of dirty relish and melody—and sometimes it's awful, plunging to the novice level: ``In his sisters' company, he'd experience a sensation of pure happiness and it would seem that everything around them emanated from those females, the world itself a fertile living thing, the earth beneath them humming with its unseen life....'' A family chronicle can manage to achieve both harmony and individuality- -Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall is an example—but it takes a concentration of imagination that Hijuelos hasn't engaged here. Fat but flat.
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-15815-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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