Comparisons with Melville and Conrad will occur to readers of this pungent tale of perilous maritime adventure—a notable departure for the author of Exiles (1997), etc. But the story is also about family unhappiness, its closest analogues (as the last line implicitly acknowledges) to be found in Faulkner’s brooding studies of overweening ambition, pride, miscegenation, and madness. This one begins in June 1901, when Bostonian Cyrus Brathwaite, who’s made fortunes salvaging wrecked ships and quarrying granite, banishes his three teenaged sons from their family’s Maine seacoast summer home, sending them off alone in a schooner (the Double Eagle) with orders not to return before fall. Stalwart 16-year-old Nathaniel (the image of his idol, Frank Merriwell) and his younger brothers, ironical Eliot and scholarly Drew—eventually accompanied by their friend Will Terhune—grudgingly, then stoically, embark on an adventure that takes them to South Carolina (and a tense meeting with their elderly great-aunt), the Tortuga Islands off Key West (to search a sunken ship that’s another part of Cyrus’s clouded history), and a “monster” hurricane and its aftermath (in Cuba), leaving one of them dead and another effectively unmanned for life, all followed by a bitter return home unaided by their indifferent father. Caputo’s very crowded story is “reconstructed,” in 1998, by descendant Sybil Brathwaite, who pieces together from the Double Eagle’s terse log, from a moribund relative’s recollections, and from various family “memorabilia” a carefully concealed history of frustration and deceit involving Cyrus’s beautiful, withdrawn wife Elizabeth, the boys’ mysterious half-brother, and their offended father’s quite possibly insane hunger for revenge. Though they’re awkwardly compressed into the closing pages’ brief compass, these disclosures strike with the force of Jacobean tragedy. The novel isn’t especially shapely, but it’s been scrupulously researched, strongly imagined, and painstakingly hammered together: those who plunge headlong into its dark waters will not soon forget the experience. (First printing of 40,000; Book-of-the-Month alternate selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-45039-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
