Loring is Yarbrough’s Yoknapatawpha County, and he uses what in other hands could be a banal plot to bring to vital life the...
A Mississippi high-school teacher can’t separate his hometown’s uneasy past from his own in this thoughtful novel from Yarbrough (The End of California, 2006, etc).
Loring native Luke May takes a just-the-facts approach to history, teaching his students the difficulty of pinpointing cause and effect. As the school year starts, Luke is at loose ends. His daughters have gone to college, his aging parents are in failing health, he and his wife Jennifer, an aspiring poet who teaches freshman English at a nearby college, have drifted into minimal verbal and sexual communication. Then he meets the flashy new French teacher, Maggie Sorrentino, née Calloway. Maggie left Loring as a little girl in 1962, after her father Arlan shot and killed her mother Nadine in what was ruled self defense. Luke’s father considered Arlan his best friend, although the more affluent Arlan was threatening his livelihood. The night of the killing, which was also the eve of James Meredith’s historic enrollment at Ole Miss, the two men had driven to Oxford as members of the local White Citizens Council. As Luke falls into an affair with Maggie, he begins digging to uncover the truth of what happened that night 44 years ago. From a snippet of conversation Maggie remembers overhearing as a child, Ned suspects that his father, a less-than-successful farmer and admitted racist but also a war hero and devoted husband to his now-senile wife, might have had some kind of relationship with Maggie’s mother not unlike Luke’s relationship with Maggie. More sleuthing brings up a romantic connection between Nadine and Luke’s otherwise saintly mentor, local newspaper editor Ellis Buchanan, who courageously stood up for integration when no one else did. Learning the truth has its price, and Luke pays dearly.
Loring is Yarbrough’s Yoknapatawpha County, and he uses what in other hands could be a banal plot to bring to vital life the complicated interplay of cause and coincidence in history and individual lives.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27170-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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