A novel that artfully spans two cultures, from a talented new author ready to take wing.
Tritto’s sparkling debut novel succeeds as a gripping tale of one man’s self-discovery.
Tritto, a veteran short story author, tells the story of Anthony Bartolo, a product manager for a high-tech firm. He and his wife, Bernadette, a buyer for an upscale department store, are DINKs—dual incomes, no kids—living well in the suburbs, as are the couples with whom they socialize. By most standards, Anthony should be content, but he still feels unfulfilled—a good thing, narratively speaking, since these characters are fairly unappealing early in the novel. Then life throws some changes at the Bartolos and their friends. Anthony is blindsided when he loses his job, which leaves him casting about for what he wants to do with his life. Such ruminations could come off as whiny, but in Tritto’s capable hands, Anthony blossoms. A member of their group dies while doing charitable work in El Salvador, and Anthony, the only one with time on his hands, volunteers to retrieve his remains. In fact, he selfishly does so without consulting Bernadette, further threatening their crumbling relationship. Anthony’s worldview changes once he lands in the Central American country, which is populated by believable characters, including his guide, Col. Juan Hernandez, a former rebel leader who serves as security for Anthony during his trip. While Anthony jumps through bureaucratic hoops in order to take his friend home, he learns to appreciate the ways of El Salvador while navigating its dangers and tragedies. Anthony arrives in El Salvador as a well-meaning but sometimes-ugly American, yet he comes back a changed man, bearing precious cargo: not only his friend’s body, but also a secret from his friend’s other life. Anthony doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows he doesn’t want his old life. Tritto helps Anthony evolve from a self-absorbed yuppie to a man more empathetic to those around him, a man readers can root for even if he still doesn’t truly know himself.
A novel that artfully spans two cultures, from a talented new author ready to take wing.Pub Date: April 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482662467
Page Count: 464
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
© 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.
