A frequently engaging but ultimately inconsistent collection that seems like a stopgap between novels.
A collection of nine stories, with occasionally reappearing characters, set in the American West.
The eclectic Everett has consistently defied pigeonholing by genre or race, though themes of identity permeate his work (Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, 2013; I Am Not Sidney Poitier, 2009). Though those novels reflect a radical ambition concerning structure and the very nature of fiction, the stories here are comparatively straightforward. The ones that specify a location are set in Wyoming, and the others could be. Many feature a rancher, a stoic of few words, whose spouse has either died or left him. None of these protagonists (particularly the disoriented but independent woman in “A High Lake”) appears particularly lonely or regretful; they have learned to accept life and nature for what they are. The earliest and many of the best stories follow a similar progression—the protagonist heads into the wilderness (usually on horseback) in search of someone or on some other quest. Often, something happens that transforms the seeker—spiritually or physically or both—and life will never be the same (even if from the outside it may look exactly the same). The language is straightforward, almost Hemingway-esque, though some of the events it describes border on the supernatural. Some of the other, subsequent stories might best be described as “existential mysteries,” which again find someone looking for or discovering something but not in the wilderness or necessarily alone. The best of these is “Finding Billy White Feather,” in which a man receives a note from the title character, whom he has never met, and learns from the conflicting reports of those who claim to know him that he's a “tall, short, skinny, fat white Indian(s) with black blond hair” or perhaps “a middle-aged, wheelchair-bound Filipina. Or a tall black man with a disfiguring scar down the center of his face.” Race is generally an offhand, matter-of-fact revelation, as if it makes no difference whether these characters are black (an anomaly in the region) or white, and even those considered Indian may not be what they claim.
A frequently engaging but ultimately inconsistent collection that seems like a stopgap between novels.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-719-1
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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