An intelligent, entertaining, and yet unconvincing mashup of Office Space, A Scanner Darkly, and A Clockwork Orange.
An artist-cum-bureaucrat gets his wife back (or a version of her) in Jones’ (Crystal Eaters, 2014, etc.) fourth novel.
It is a summer of thunderstorms and xenophobic unrest in A-Ville, but Vincent, a former painter who works for the state, hardly notices. He’s reeling with depression because his wife, Alice—fed up with Vincent’s emotional enslavement to the retirement package (still hypothetical and more than 20 years away) that keeps him from quitting his job and leaving A-Ville—has divorced him. Then Vincent is asked to participate in PER, a program run by Ronald Reagan worshipper Dorian Blood, who promises that PER will allow Vincent to “live a fulfilling existence while being a productive worker”; in other words, it will distort his experience of reality so that he can work with “stunning proficiency” while “physically interacting with the life [he’s] always wanted.” Vincent has reservations, but Jones wouldn’t have a book if Vincent didn’t acquiesce, so he does, only to discover that his ideal life consists of just one change: It includes Alice. An uneasy mishmash of social satire, moral fable, dystopian sci-fi, and love story, Jones’ novel slides between the influential shadows of writers like Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, Philip K. Dick, and Don DeLillo while never quite cohering into a convincing shape of its own. This is, in part, because the world—a twist and shake different from our own—feels incompletely built. PER Alice, for example, is never quite convincing as an entity, mostly because we don’t know the metaphysical rules of her existence: Sometimes she’s visible and audible to others—when she answers the telephone, her words are heard—and yet she’s also a nontangible figment of Vincent’s memory. Similarly underdeveloped are A-ville’s violence and racism, the existence of which would powerfully indict Vincent’s solipsism—people are attacking Muslims while he perpetuates his fantasies and earns his pension—if the scenes that describe it, which are jocular and cartoonish, didn’t feel written solely to have exactly that moral effect. However, Jones is an acute cultural observer and a very funny aphorist—“Anger is lazy”; “Men are brave but only inside cars”; “Everything makes sense if you let it”;—and his book, despite its faults, contains many delights.
An intelligent, entertaining, and yet unconvincing mashup of Office Space, A Scanner Darkly, and A Clockwork Orange.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9992186-7-9
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Tyrant Books
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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