Sad families, haunted by the familiar, creep inside you and linger there. A newcomer to follow.
A strong debut collection about family disasters and betrayals explores ordinary dramas extraordinarily.
Forced change—death and divorce—descend on these characters who are all caught in a kind of purgatory between happiness and failure, unsure which way to turn and often acting out criminally as a result. In “Nostalgia,” a man watches his wife and her lover move while contemplating his own arrest for breaking into O. Henry’s house. In “New Years,” a woman must confront her husband’s literal purgatory—a cracked head and hospital stay from a fall in the snow on New Year’s Eve—while confronting as well his younger girlfriend. Nature and instinct intrude throughout, our sedated civilization set beside a kind of emotional wilderness that threatens in the form of weather, vandals, and random evil thoughts. In “Riverfest,” nature becomes real in the form of water and navigating on it—or, rather, failing to, as a man discovers his own capacity for violence, thanks to another forced ending in his life. Blackwood, coordinator of the Writing Center at the University of Texas (Austin), is capable of sly, sudden poignancy—you can feel him learning and growing with sketches like “One of Us Is Hidden Away,” a convincing portrait of a young pregnant woman alone in her dilemma. The title story may owe its voice and distance to Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, but these nine tales just as often recall Margaret Atwood or Michael Martone. Unique, though, is the detailing of ordinary crisis, enlivened by a delayed, drawn-out feel. Real time is revealed to be unrevealing, and characters linger like ghosts, resisting the change they will ultimately fail to avoid. Several stories about the same set of characters and events suggest that this writer has his eye on the bigger picture.
Sad families, haunted by the familiar, creep inside you and linger there. A newcomer to follow.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-87074-464-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Southern Methodist Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
