A woman’s life changes when her friend develops Alzheimer’s disease and unknowingly reveals a closely kept secret.
Dara, Tommie and Meg have been best friends since childhood. Over the decades, they’ve seen each other through marriages, children and hard times: Dara’s breast cancer, Tommie’s divorce and the death of Tommie’s only child, Jessica, who was 22 and pregnant when she died from leukemia. Dara is at first reluctant to acknowledge what’s happening to Tommie; she finds herself enjoying a trip to Las Vegas, especially cherishing “the sensation…that she still seemed to be moving in an unreal world where nothing bad could happen.” When Tommie lets slip a long-buried secret—Jerry, Dara’s husband, was actually Jessica’s father—Dara thinks: “This must be what it feels like to die.” Hurt and reeling, Dara flees to Las Vegas, where she becomes friends with a young dancer who puts her up. Eventually, she finds work as a waitress and meets a charming widower. As she reconsiders her life, Dara will have to decide what she really wants and where she belongs. Paul (Sins of the Empress, 2013, etc.) deftly sketches this quickly moving story, impressively differentiating the three best friends. As the novel begins, for example, Dara plays bridge because all her friends do, even though she hates it; she’s so genteel that she “had never said ‘sucks’ out loud,” but by the end of the novel, when Dara is considering returning home, she’s able to tell Meg, “I hate bridge, and the book club sucks.” Paul gives Dara an interesting foil in Margaret/Amber/Tatiana, the name-changing young dancer who gives her a place to stay and challenges some preconceptions; her relationship with lonely widower Hal is also delicately handled. Paul adds nuance and feeling to what could be a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Although the motif of a fed-up middle-aged woman taking off to consider her options isn’t new, Paul delivers a thoughtful take on it.
Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497515598
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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