A promising talent in service of an admirable goal resulting in a disappointingly didactic novel.
The lives of a diverse cast of characters intertwine against the backdrop of violence and bitter conflict in Israel and Palestine.
Jerusalem, the “city of a thousand gates,” is also a city of a thousand experiences of occupation; in Sacks’ debut, she has seemingly set herself the ambitious goal of representing as many of these experiences as possible. As they reel from twinned acts of violence—a 14-year-old Israeli girl in a settlement stabbed to death, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy beaten into a coma—various inhabitants and visitors in this contested region go about their daily lives, dealing with the usual complexities of friendship, desire, and marriage on top of the sensationalized politics that envelop them. The novel shifts among the perspectives of more than a dozen characters: Arab Palestinians living in Israel proper and in the occupied territories, Israeli Jews of various political orientations, American Jews with complicated and divergent relationships to Zionism, a German journalist trying to make her name by writing about it all. Sacks’ prose is evocative and often a pleasure to read, but her narrative sacrifices depth for the sake of breadth. Her dogged attempt to show the multifacetedness of this extraordinarily fraught conflict and humanize its players is admirable in theory but sometimes ineffective in execution. In her attempt to humanize the media circus that so often attends news coverage of Israel and Palestine, she actually ends up flattening it, as each character’s narrative feels increasingly like a counterpoint to another equally subjective narrative, a mere means to a didactic end. While some characters, such as Emily and Vera, are rich and complex, others veer into caricature, reading like boxes the author felt obligated to check rather than authentic, artful creations. With its tit-for-tat violence and carefully varied cast of characters, the novel projects an oversimple thesis that Israelis and Palestinians (as well as those with other stakes in the conflict) are both victims and perpetrators, both participants and observers in cycles of hatred and violence. The extension of that thesis is the treacly trope that if these parties could simply understand one another better, the conflict would be solved. To her credit, Sacks attempts to preempt some of the critiques commonly leveled at such narratives—for instance, she makes clear the imbalance of power in a fight between occupier and occupied—but even the inclusion of these important nuances feels inevitably formulaic. Sacks is a gifted prose stylist, but the stunning loveliness of large portions of her debut is unfortunately obscured by its formulaic both-sides-ism.
A promising talent in service of an admirable goal resulting in a disappointingly didactic novel.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06301-147-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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