An ambitious but often unexciting mystery and investigation of Southern race relations.
A Southern son searches for a long-lost friend amid the racial tensions of the 1960s in Valentine’s (Dark Epiphany, 2000, etc.) latest novel.
In 1970, Southern journalist Arlis Morrow goes on a mission after his mother, on her deathbed, reveals that his childhood friend, Jesse, once saved her from a snakebite. His act of bravery remained secret, however, because Jesse was black, and Arlis’ father was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. Arlis’ mother’s dying wish is for her son to find out what happened to Jesse. The mission is tough, however, as he can’t remember Jesse’s last name, and his neighbors are little help. A whole cast of characters, black and white, try to dissuade him from digging around in the past, but their resistance only makes him search harder. He tells everyone that he wants to write about the divergence of his and Jesse’s lives, how the civil rights movement and the disorder of the 1960s have impacted them both; his goal, he says, is “to trace the life of just one single person…and place its imprint on another single human being.” It’s a fascinating idea and a plausible pitch but seems strikingly modern and suggests hindsight that readers may not find believable for the time, as the story takes place only two years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. However, Arlis has other motives for finding Jesse, as he suspects that Jesse may have some information about his father’s mysterious death two years earlier. At times, the story could use some editing; for example, one single paragraph clocks in at four pages long. The book is largely well-written, however; the characters are well-rounded, and Valentine is wonderfully committed to the language and landscape of the South. However, Arlis’ many interactions are often similar—he meets initial resistance from nearly everyone he meets, and then receives an explanation, vague information and a warning. By the end, readers may be eager for Arlis to find Jesse just so something new will happen.
An ambitious but often unexciting mystery and investigation of Southern race relations.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482591446
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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