Ruthless editing might have liberated an intriguing thesis and sharply drawn protagonists from 100 pages of extraneous...
A double murder leads to some ugly discoveries about a small New Hampshire town and internet-fueled gossip in Baldwin’s ambitious second novel.
Unlike his witty and relaxed memoir (Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down, 2012), Baldwin’s fiction strains for significance, and this one is even more overstuffed than its predecessor (You Lost Me There, 2010), with more plot and characters than the author’s technical abilities can handle. Baldwin crafts strong back stories and emotional issues for Martin Krug, a cop on the verge of retirement headed for his second divorce, and Nick Toussaint, the troubled 20-year-old he plucks from a crashed car who promptly confesses to killing the two blood-stained corpses in the back seat. And Nick’s 16-year-old truelove, Emily, subject to vicious cyberbullying and a controlling best friend, is the novel’s most full-bodied and complex character, tougher than her fragile exterior suggests. But around these three mill too many people who drop in and out of the story too often to sustain readers’ attention. Thelsa Mann, recently laid off from the Village Voice, is introduced early on and pointed in the direction of the hometown she shares with Nick and Emily, then disappears for more than 60 pages before arriving in New Hampshire to wander around obtaining a lot of thirdhand information—including a bombshell revelation about the motive behind the murders that is conveyed by a character we have just met, who heard it from someone who wasn’t there. Baldwin several times employs this technique of initially doling out plot points via a non-eyewitness, thereby muffling the impact of the eventual, fuller account by an actual participant. He seems to be making a statement about the way misinformation is spread in our hyperconnected culture, and a few clever passages of text messages reinforce it, but on the whole it simply makes for a muddy narrative.
Ruthless editing might have liberated an intriguing thesis and sharply drawn protagonists from 100 pages of extraneous material. As it stands, admirable but overreaching.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-29856-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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