First-novelist Keech, Maryland's assistant attorney general, debuts with an antic, unsentimental urban folk tale offering genuine sociopolitical bite. Though in the midst of filing an important federal case, Sport Norris, acting chief attorney of Baltimore's Legal Assistance Society, agrees to help Charles Gage, an aging ex-alcoholic who's inherited a house from his late great-aunt. As it happens, this dwelling sits on waterfront property needed for a hush-hush condo complex backed by the city's top developers and officials. While speculators and the builder's operatives pressure Charles to sell out, Sport wages legal war against the Department of Public Welfare; for more than five years, this agency has been denying medical benefits to indigent applicants by arbitrarily assuming that their residences have basements that could yield supplemental income. Indeed, hard-core careerist Leonard Tynan, deputy director of welfare, has pangs of conscience that make it easier for him to work both sides of the street. Meanwhile, ambitious State Senator Sam (Slip) Slidell decides to ingratiate himself with the unions and joins forces with ex-nun Sister Elena, who displays an unsuspected flair for rabble-rousing on live TV. At the chaotic close, Sport settles the class-action lawsuit with Leonard; the ailing Charles makes a good deal for himself; and Slip (a better man for having loved and perhaps lost) goes on to enter the gubernatorial race. Newcomer Keech has a firm grasp of what drives upper-echelon bureaucrats, self-anointed do-gooders, media types, the monied classes, and uncivil servants, and an equally solid hold on political reality. All in all, then: an uncommonly entertaining municipal report.
Pub Date: April 28, 1995
ISBN: 1-880909-34-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
Chicana writer Castillo (whose reputation until now has been mostly regional) brings a warm, sometimes biting but not bitter feminist consciousness to the wondrous, tragic, and engaging lives of a New Mexico mother and her four fated daughters. Poor Sofi! Abandoned by her gambler husband to raise four unusual girls who tend to rise from adversity only to find disaster. ``La Loca,'' dead at age three, comes back to life—but is unable to bear the smell of human beings; Esperanza succeeds as a TV anchorwoman—but is less successful with her exploitative lover and disappears during the Gulf War; promiscuous, barhopping Caridad—mutilated and left for dead—makes a miraculous recovery, but her life on earth will still be cut short by passion; and the seemingly self-controlled Fe is so efficient that ``even when she lost her mind [upon being jilted]...she did it without a second's hesitation.'' Sofi's life-solution is to found an organization M.O.M.A.S. (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), while Castillo tries to solve the question of minority-writer aesthetics: Should a work of literature provide a mirror for marginalized identity? Should it celebrate and preserve threatened culture? Should it be politically progressive? Should the writer aim for art, social improvement, or simple entertainment? Castillo tries to do it all—and for the most part succeeds. Storytelling skills and humor allow Castillo to integrate essaylike folklore sections (herbal curing, saint carving, cooking)—while political material (community organizing, toxic chemicals, feminism, the Gulf War) is delivered with unabashed directness and usually disarming charm.
Pub Date: April 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03490-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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