Probably the fullest picture of the hippie culture of the late ’60s since Marge Piercy’s early fiction, and one of Boyle’s...
Boyle’s protean imagination works overtime in his thickly plotted ninth novel, a big, racy tale of the conflict between a radical utopian commune’s idealistic visions and the simpler imperatives of survival in the Alaskan wilderness.
In Drop City, a California hippie enclave in 1970, we observe through the eyes of its newest members: “Star,” a restless dropout from her parents’ straight life, and Mario, a hardier type who drifts into the City because he knows he wants to build things. Boyle then shifts to Boynton, Alaska (near Fairbanks), where homesteader Cecil (“Sess”) Harder and his new wife Pamela begin their life together in Sess’s well-stocked cabin in the deep woods. As parallel chunks of narrative further introduce us to both sets of characters, a ludicrous auto accident brings the heat down on Drop City, and its putative guru Norm (whose inherited wealth pays the bills) leads the group’s relocation to Alaska, where the peace-and-love people collide with the Harders. A cruel winter, sexual and racial disharmony, and Norm’s decision to pull up his personal stakes exact their toll, and the story churns fatalistically toward its violent climax, on Halloween, in sub-zero cold. Boyle has worked this territory before in several sensationally effective stories, but never with such telling detail and devastating characterizations. The best of the latter include the stoical Sess and warmhearted Pamela, murderous trapper (and Sess’s mortal enemy) Joe Bosky, and weak-willed Ronnie Sommers (a.k.a. Pan), a lethal combination of ingenuous flower-power and uncontrollable appetites. Boyle (After the Plague, 2001, etc.) never fails to enthrall and entertain, but the mordant tragicomic momentum is perhaps too explicitly subordinated to his agenda—revealed in such sequences as the aftermath of a scary episode that endangered Drop City’s toddlers (“They [i.e., the adults] didn’t want to save children, they wanted to be children”).
Probably the fullest picture of the hippie culture of the late ’60s since Marge Piercy’s early fiction, and one of Boyle’s best.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03172-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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