A modest but quirky collection defined by forbearance amid life’s left turns.
One Tacoma bar and the dozen or so people who were there on St. Patrick's Day 1968 inspire this linked set of seriocomic stories that hopscotches across a half-century.
This collection from Wiley (Bob Stevenson, 2016, etc.) emphasizes unlikely transformations over time—and, as the title suggests, the role of place in those transformations. And though Wiley juggles plenty of characters, he has a light touch that's fitting for a book rooted in the free-wheeling '60s in a small Northwest city. Establishing a dramatis personae in the opening story, "Your Life Should Have Meaning on the Day You Die," his remaining 13 tales mostly address the ensuing years, with some recurring characters. Philosophy professor Earl loses his grip on his lover, Mary, who’s more interested in the Tacoma house where The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was filmed. Andy, a lawyer, can’t shake his obsession with a former student, serial killer Ted Bundy, to the point of buying his home. Mary works at the car dealership run by Lars, who in 1977 watched his marriage collapse and relationship with his father crater; 32 years later he falls for his father’s Eritrean caretaker. And though Mary was the bartender everyone lusted over back in the day, by 2011 she’s single and suffering through an eHarmony date. Though there’s little in the way of an arc, there’s a strong feeling of a shared generational struggle, and Wiley is at his best when playing up his cohort’s peculiarities. Teacher Ralph visits the home of a former student, whose “life-size and perfect likeness” of her late father sits on the back deck; a vibrator becomes a prop for a French farce of a double date. Wiley’s characters occasionally utter only-in-literary-fiction lines (“Who is the me that I want Earl to see if the me he sees isn’t me?” Mary laments). But mostly he delivers a realistic sense of things not turning out as planned.
A modest but quirky collection defined by forbearance amid life’s left turns.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942658-54-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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