A dense, ambitious social saga with a sci-fi tinge.
A literary novel chronicles a young man’s peculiar relationship to objects.
In a near future where increasing levels of technology have made people both interconnected and more isolated, Cole Scott-Knox-Under chooses a different path. A 27-year-old with eyes that “embody the observant fearful gaze of the autodidact: deep skepticism fused to emotional vulnerability,” Cole has chosen to work at Burger King, taking lunch orders while (mostly) avoiding the invasive demands of modernity. He has been instructed to wear virtual reality glasses at all times (which allow him to view his customers’ online lives as presented in clouds around their heads), though he refuses due to a strong aversion to VR that goes back to his teenage years. Cole is more attracted to the analog than the digital, compulsively collecting objects—cup lids, papers bags, plastic utensils—and storing them under his bed in his mother’s apartment. He is already balancing the pressures of family, identity, and a host of social expectations demanded by the colorful characters that populate his life, but things get really strange when the garbage Cole collects begins to speak to him. A plastic cup named Jason thanks Cole for picking him off the ground, but tells him, “There are more. They need to be rescued as well.” Cole isn’t sure if he’s crazy or uniquely sane, but whatever his neurological state, it is driving him to exhaustion. In a world where everything, both animate and inanimate, is made to be disposable, Cole desperately seeks something permanent on which to anchor his life. Bramble’s (Grid City Overload, 2012, etc.) work evokes that of many 20th-century authors who sought to grapple with their eras’ technological tumult. His postmodern maximalism calls to mind Thomas Pynchon and William T. Vollmann; his grim dystopianism, Orwell and Margaret Atwood; his overt social criticism, Richard Wright and Kurt Vonnegut. The prose is clear and precise, though it accumulates with the heft of bricks piled to form a wall. The author possesses a particular interest in the physicality and unnaturalness of the objects in Cole’s world: “Aerosol deodorant cans; wasted steel shells burnt from escaping xylyl bromide; stockpiles of burned CDs now too scratched and so laid to death; lungs withered and crusted with sulfur.” Cole may be the protagonist, but the story’s strongest personality is its authorial third-person narrator, who routinely pulls the reader away from the hero to offer essayistic digressions on the nature of technology and society using frequent (and sometimes-multipage) excerpts from sources as varied as scientific studies, Salon articles, and Will Self novels. On its own, the book represents an impressive intellectual feat. As the third volume in a triptych of novels concerned with technology’s impact on the way humans think and feel, the work confirms the prodigious talent of its author. Cerebral and often funny, this is by no means a tale for everyone. But those readers who like their fiction built on heady concepts will find this book to be a challenging and gratifying experience.
A dense, ambitious social saga with a sci-fi tinge.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5087-7263-7
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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.
