An original office comedy that dots all the I’s and crosses all the T’s: Think a dash of Office Space, a pinch of Palahniuk...
A contract lawyer with a traumatic brain injury tries to decide whether to piece together the shattered fragments of his old life or simply start a new one from scratch. It’s a lot funnier than it sounds.
New Zealand–based public-relations director Glancy pulls off a terrific bit of comic timing in this debut novel about a lawyer who teaches all the scoundrels in his life to read the fine print. Franklyn Shaw is a lawyer who has recently suffered a horrific car accident that has led to traumatic synesthesia and selective amnesia. “The accident had smashed my separately labelled jars—Sad, Happy, Mad—into a sloshing chaos of wild fluids,” he tells us. “I wanted to laugh, cry and scream all at once, all the time.” To maintain control over his mixed-up life, Shaw meticulously footnotes his observations throughout the book, and they’re hilarious, relating which incidents were merely fantasies and not real or making admissions about bitter criticisms he claims not to mean. We meet Franklyn’s wife, Alice, a once soft-bodied writer who has become a supersevere careerist. Franklyn saves much of his scorn for his older brother, Oscar, who holds the reins at the family law firm and makes a sport out of scorning Franklyn. His little brother, Malc, retains Franklyn’s affections, but we only know him from email missives relating his backpacking adventures overseas. Franklyn’s only real supporter is Doug, a Zen-minded statistician who may be the only person willing to tell him the real truth about how happy Old Frank really was in the first place. As Franklyn starts remembering things and connecting the dots about his lonely life, he begins assembling an act of rebellion that will find readers rooting for this unusual protagonist to make a clean getaway.
An original office comedy that dots all the I’s and crosses all the T’s: Think a dash of Office Space, a pinch of Palahniuk and a glance at Regarding Henry.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-643-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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