A welcome return that will leave readers looking forward to future work from McIlvain.
The author of Elders (2013) serves up another story of true belief and its discontents, this time set in the time of failing banks, rising inequality, and the Occupy movement.
It seems fitting that McIlvain should begin his story with a tennis match: tennis, after all, is the beloved domain of David Foster Wallace, patron saint of latter-day postmodern literature, but it also makes a nicely convenient symbolic backdrop against which to pit friends about to face a shattering agon, “a pair of pale intellectuals disgracing the game.” Sam Westergard is a Mormon-turned-socialist; the narrator, Eli, a bookish young man who finds Sam a perfect sparring partner in a Marxist theory course in grad school. (“I was just tired of poetry workshops,” Sam sighs, “and maybe a little curious.”) Theory becomes praxis when fellow travelers turn activist—and when their attention to matters of social justice takes on deadly seriousness. With its distant villain a shadowy Enron-era energy conglomerate, the story recalls Newton Thornburg’s novel Cutter and Bone at a few points, but whereas the earlier story was all sinewy, whiskey-soaked action, McIlvain seems more interested in exploring the contours of friendship and betrayal, with murder and intramural politics more bits of backdrop against that larger scenario of manners and ideas. Readers may find it helpful to have nodding familiarity with Marxist and Trotskyist thought to get some of McIlvain’s learned humor, but old-school lefties will surely nod in appreciation and recognition at his knowing description of communard angst: “What’s with all the Stalinist secrecy around here?” demands a comrade, Jamaal. “Do we have to fuck our way to the top?” An admonition swiftly follows: “What a charming reactionary you’d make.” Altogether, the story seems a touch more labored than McIlvain’s assured debut effort but still memorable, the details just right.
A welcome return that will leave readers looking forward to future work from McIlvain.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-41788-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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