Still, the emotion here is real, if obscured and muted by a cloud of emotion.
Thirteen stories/essays paint a nostalgic portrait of a family that, despite a certain intimacy, feels very far away.
“I fear, as much as a I desire, this inheritance,” our narrator says near the close of Brown’s slight fifth collection (What Keeps Me Here, 1996, etc.). “I want to keep what they have given me, I want to rid myself of it.” You can’t tell whether the intent here is essay or fiction—a good deal is left out of the tales that a label of truth might fill in quite nicely. In “Learning to See,” for example, a youthful deformed eye, aimed directly back into the narrator’s head, comes to stand for introspection, nostalgia, and regret. “The Fish” is made up of a distant father’s memories, having to do with fishing, but will he be man enough to set free the one that didn’t get away? A nearly standardized friendship at summer camp (“Nancy Booth, Wherever You Are”) leads to the self-helpy moral: “I want to tell her I survived and I am happy now. I want to tell her I am grateful,” while sexual emergence is chronicled in the lust our narrator feels for a teacher in “A Vision,” an infatuation that takes on a dreamy, mystical dimension. “The Smokers” aspires to little more than a family history given in narrow focus on the act of smoking, and “An Element” takes a similar tack around water as a concept, while “My Mother’s Body” a matter-of-fact account of the rituals of attending to a corpse. Brown takes a step backward here with what feels like storytelling indecisiveness. As fiction, these pieces are missing something critical that’s nevertheless hard to pinpoint—like puzzle dioramas whose solution is to find what’s wrong or missing in the picture.
Still, the emotion here is real, if obscured and muted by a cloud of emotion.Pub Date: May 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-87286-418-9
Page Count: 132
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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