A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
A compelling story about a woman in a deeply patriarchal society.
A 33-year-old woman in Seoul slowly breaks under the burden of misogyny she's been facing all her life.
Kim Jiyoung’s life is typical of a woman in South Korea. Born the second of three siblings, with an older sister and younger brother, her experiences with patriarchy begin early. At home, her brother gets preferential treatment and less responsibility. At school, she’s told that boys who bully her just like her. Though her mother encourages and supports her in myriad ways, including making sure she goes to university and follows her heart, Jiyoung grows to realize that in every aspect of life and work, women are dehumanized, devalued, and objectified. The book’s strength lies in how succinctly Cho captures the relentless buildup of sexism and gender discrimination over the course of one woman’s life. With clinical detachment, the book covers Jiyoung’s childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, first job, and, finally, marriage and motherhood. The pressure of the patriarchy is so incessant that she starts to dissociate, transforming into other women she’s known, like her mother and her college friend. The central critique of patriarchy is clearly—and necessarily—tied in to that of capitalism. Jiyoung wonders, as she catalogs the ways in which the world is built to accommodate “maximum output with minimum input...who’ll be the last one standing in a world with these priorities, and will they be happy?” To be clear, there’s nothing revolutionary here—it’s basically feminism 101 but in novel form, complete with occasional footnotes. There is not a single move to recognize anything outside of a binary gender. But the story perfectly captures misogynies large and small that will be recognizable to many.
A compelling story about a woman in a deeply patriarchal society.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-670-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.
Two women, two Greek tragedies, one modern revamping.
British classicist Haynes writes a rejoinder—in fiction—to the near muteness of women in ancient Western texts. As she did with her psychological thriller, The Furies (2014), Haynes dives straight for Sophocles’ monumental plays. This time, she puts a mother and daughter on center stage instead of Sophocles’ title characters in Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. Each woman has “the sense that someone was nearby, wishing her ill.” For Queen Jocasta of Thebes, it is the housekeeper Teresa, whose wickedness puts Mrs. Danvers of Rebecca to shame. For Jocasta’s youngest child, Ismene, the menace arrives in the first chapter. An orphan from age 5, the bookish 15-year-old leaves her reading nook only to be knifed by a stranger in the assumed safety of the palace. This thwarted political assassination dissolves into Chapter 2, which introduces Jocasta at the same age, bundled off a generation earlier to wed Thebes’ fossilized King Laius. This complex opening structure settles into chapters that alternate between the two women. The device works well, building tension as mother and daughter both struggle with confinement, treachery, politics, and hair. (Some verities apparently hold for 2.5 millennia.) After Laius dies, Jocasta becomes notorious—and thanks to Sophocles, immortal—for unwittingly marrying her son, Oedipus. This Gordian knot of incest still has the power to shock, and Haynes is deft with it and with its consequences for the next generation. Her grasp of the ancient city-state is marvelously firm. Her sturdy sentences conjure the punishing Greek summer heat that quells movement and the gold rings bunching the fat on the fingers of florid men. But unlike the classically inspired novels of Madeline Miller or Colm Tóibín, antiquity bogs down in Haynes’ expository prose. And while the author adds an intriguing new character, the physician Sophon who is instrumental to both mother and daughter, the women themselves remain too flat on the page.
Characters aren’t as strong as the plot borrowed from antiquity.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-480-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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