These ingenious and lovable stories crack open the world.
Tragedies big and small are faced with indomitable wit in 12 stories.
The subjects of Perabo’s (The Broken Places, 2001, etc.) stories range from the slightly dark to the really tough. On the lighter side: middle school students blackmail their teacher after witnessing her messing around with the principal; a child gives her stuffed armadillo the name of her mother’s ex-lover; a lonely woman’s one good friend announces plans to leave town. At the blacker end, there’s a story that begins “My mother was thrilled to be dying of brain cancer after a lifetime of smoking.” Or “The boy fell from the balcony sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning.” Both of those stories—in fact, each of the stories about death in the book—use metafictional elements in a way reminiscent of George Saunders, to illuminate the function of story in our lives, its power and its helplessness. In “Story Goes,” which gives The Fault in Our Stars a run for its money in the voice department, a teenage cancer patient tries to help a friend commit suicide. “If you close your eyes and listen very hard you can actually hear, through years and miles, my 15-year-old brain creaking forward like a long dormant watermill while I process this massive amount of new and confusing information.” Perabo’s facility with teenage narrators also shines in “Treasure,” about a plane crash witnessed from a high school football field and a good crush gone bad. “If life really can be compared to a hand of cards, I’m fairly certain that those cards remain facedown until sixth or seventh grade and only then do you get to turn them over and see who you actually are.” Stealth wisdom is the hallmark of this collection, hiding in each piece like the prize in a Cracker Jack box. As a former bike racer tells his catastrophizing friend in the title story, “Everybody gets to be a little pathetic. But you can’t have more than your share, or there’s not enough to go around. You can’t be a hog about it.”
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6143-5
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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