Lin (Richard Yates, 2010, etc.) focuses on the lives of post-post-modern Gen Y artists in his third novel.
No action-adventure herein. Think internal dialogue. Think angst-filled, uber-jaundiced existentialism. A hundred pages in, protagonist Paul is still prowling Brooklyn parties and bars. He's made a quick trip home to Taiwan, but little happened there either. Back in the borough, Paul has moved from one maybe-a-girlfriend to another, met dealer friends who trade in recreational pharmaceuticals—Xanax, Adderall, cocaine, 'shrooms and MDMA—and ruminated a bit about his novel, soon to be released. The narrative drones along with flat affect, thoroughly reportorial in style, right down to the quirky introductions of characters with a newspaper-style name/age format: "When Paul woke, the next afternoon, Laura, 28, had already friended and messaged him on Facebook." And so it goes, artistic Weltschmerz profundity. Paul is intelligent; his IQ is "either 139 or 154." He invites friends to watch Trash Humpers, uses a MacBook and iPhone, and his life is rendered with a fondness for commas. "When Gabby finally looked at him, seeming more confused than agitated, Paul sarcastically sustained a huge grin, which Gabby stared at blankly while appearing to be thinking, very slowly, due to alcohol, about what, if anything, she should do about what was happening." There begins a book tour (mind-altering drugs fueling readings), perhaps best characterized as a geographical relocation of the same hipster existentialist remove from all but what happens between Paul’s ears, the exception being his companion, Erin, a young Baltimore woman he meets via the Internet, whom he marries in a nothing-better-to-do Las Vegas decision. Post-Taipei honeymoon, with Erin bouncing between Baltimore and Brooklyn, the marriage seems off-again, on-again, spiced by avant-garde MacBook-filmed self-documentaries and drug-addled conversations and text messaging both childish and surreal. Very much au courant, a meditation on "the nonexistent somethingness that was currently life."
Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95017-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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