An entertaining tale rich in schadenfreude as bad things happen to a hapless billionaire.
A gimlet-eyed writer observes the life of a New York property baron as it unravels amid personal, business, and legal woes.
Greenland (I Regret Everything: A Love Story, 2015, etc.) is a screenwriter and playwright whose fifth novel recalls Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities—except the rich guy is an implausibly good person. Jay Gladstone inherited and expanded a New York real estate empire that has allowed him, by the year 2012, to own five homes and a professional basketball team, practice philanthropy, and bask in a well-buffed public persona. His biggest flaw is pride that slides toward myopic self-righteousness and can render him dangerously uncool on hot-button issues. Life is generally good, though—and then it isn’t. His star ballplayer doesn’t like his proposed new contract. Jay’s second wife wants a baby, which goes against the prenup. Jay’s college-age daughter from marriage No. 1 is sleeping with a black female classmate, who disrupts the family Seder with a pointed comment on black slaves vs. the Jews’ biblical slavery. Jay’s cousin and partner in the family firm is embezzling. But Jay is coping well until he drives his car into the aforementioned ballplayer after catching him in bed with Mrs. Gladstone No. 2. The scene is recorded on her smartphone and soon goes public, along with Jay’s statement: "Why does everyone in this family need to have sex with black people?" Racism has been a simmering theme in the book since a white cop shot a black man early on, through the Seder, and in the college students’ debate on racial politics as they prepare a play on the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Now racism hangs heavy on Jay and his legal predicament, which dovetails with the political ambitions of a district attorney who needs a showcase trial with a racial component to appeal to various slices of the electorate. Greenland takes a Dickensian delight in letting the plot sprawl with parallels, digressions, false leads, and twists. The ultimate twist may be the ending, which puts Jay’s possible absolution in the unlikeliest quarter.
An entertaining tale rich in schadenfreude as bad things happen to a hapless billionaire.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60945-462-3
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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