When Boudinot writes shtick, he’s tiresome. When he writes fully developed stories, he’s abrasive, thought-provoking and...
Weirdness rules in the 13 button-pushing stories of this debut collection by a talented Seattle writer.
Many are quick black-comic jabs, set in an absurdly over-regimented, depersonalized near-future. For example, the mandate to respect diversity is sorely tested by a woman executive who wears a “Bee Beard” to her office. High-school graduates are offered full college scholarships for “do[ing] the shit work of making America proud”—by murdering their parents (thus, one infers, making way for more patriotic new generations). “The Sales Team” (in an acknowledged parody of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross) turns its reps into “Modern-day Vikings” who get customers’ attention via housebreaking, rape and murder. If Donald Barthelme had cohabited with Kathy Acker, he might have dreamed up these, or the brief “Absolut Boudinot,” about terrorists who oppose “decadent Western civilization” by wreaking genocidal mayhem on Halloween. But Boudinot can do better, notably in the fine title story—also set during Halloween, when a kid who arrives at school dressed as Hitler finds the little girl on whom he dotes garbed as Anne Frank. The story twists memorably, as Boudinot makes us realize that the boy’s confrontational masquerade expresses his divorced father’s pathetic clamoring for attention. Good things also happen in “Written by Machines,” the tale of a software geek’s Faustian pact with his cancer-ridden colleague, who has created a computer program that writes original poetry (shades of Richard Powers here). Best of all is “So Little Time,” whose preadolescent narrator weighs the enticements of sexual hearsay and a (hilariously described) sci-fi convention with the hopeless real life of his disadvantaged buddy, whose embittered dirt-poor family endures dangers far removed from the tacky melodramatics of “Dungeons and Dragons” and British TV’s Dr. Who.
When Boudinot writes shtick, he’s tiresome. When he writes fully developed stories, he’s abrasive, thought-provoking and explosively funny.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-357-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
