With wit, impressive description and resonance to the commonalities of the human condition, this chronicle of a man...
A third Appalachian tale from Maryland resident Skipper (Tear Down the Mountain, 2006, etc.) finds Tuesday Price—equal parts modern-day Huck Finn and Huck Finn’s drunk dad—struggling to escape the cruel snares of alcoholism and a guilt-ridden past.
Price’s wife Linda was with him on that winding mountain road the night the body of his best friend Matt turned up run-over. Price, drunk, had fought with Matt earlier that night. Despite suspicious circumstances, evidence can’t be found to convict Price, but the tragedy sets off a series of accusations that lead to his preacher father’s being let go from the church and, as Price sees it, his death. When Linda leaves him, the loop of his self-pitying existence shrinks to include little more than Ace’s Hole in the Wall Bar and his double-wide trailor. Enter Lilo, a silent old man stoically sitting out his days in a derelict pickup. When Lilo dies, Price discovers a dog chained behind the trailer, echoing the demise of Price’s childhood pet after the disappearance of his depressive mother, an act of deliberate negligence and cruelty he cannot forgive. Apparitions of Lilo and the dead dog haunt Price as he tries to quit his boozing. Despite visits from old drinking buddies and the skunk-like taint of failure, Linda’s pregnancy gives him the will-power to sober up and keep a job. Price is a runner, literally and figuratively, but run as he might on these coal-veined mountains, he can’t outrun his mistakes. Soon enough he loses his job and goes back on the sauce, bottoming out when the facts and mysteries of his past pursue him to his abandoned childhood home where, tormented by naysaying demons, he obsessively labors to rebuild his parents’ home. His only company a fallen preacher, a fire-brand old lady and a blind dog, Price hammers, saws, planes and plumbs his way toward penitence and forgiveness, discovering the truths and misinterpretations that have turned him again and again to the bottle. Will this flawed and frustrated narrator quell his pig-headed and self-destructive tendencies and win back the woman who loves him and carries his child? In pithy mountain vernacular, Price narrates a personal history written in the disappearing ink of whiskey. Vivid, caustic observations and an ear for dialogue breathe life into Skipper’s characters, making them worthy of our sympathy.
With wit, impressive description and resonance to the commonalities of the human condition, this chronicle of a man struggling with himself holds interest even when the action slows and closes on the repeated missteps of a self-described sinner.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-563-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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