Exhilarating: like a good run in bad weather.
Novelist and essay-writer McGuane (Nothing But Blue Skies, 1992; The Longest Silence, 1999; etc.) assembles a large cast for a small but satisfying story about crazies, their keepers, and their victims in his beloved and beguiling Montana.
Through his nastily manipulative last will and testament, the late Sunny Jim Whitelaw continues to torment the family he drove round the bend. In order to cash out of the pop-bottling business Jim’s son-in-law Paul Crusoe is speedily running into the ground, Whitelaw’s will requires his hard-riding daughter Evelyn to end her separation from the sexy but wildly unsteady Paul. Failing that reconciliation, the heirs will all be required to live off the shrinking soda-pop profits that Paul seems hell-bent on eliminating altogether. There is considerable pressure on Evelyn from sister Natalie, who needs plenty of cash if she is to shuck her nerdy but managerially competent husband Stuart, and from Jim’s widow Alice, who wants to go on an Alaskan cruise and then live a nice life now that her tomcatting husband is safely buried. But Evelyn is already leading a nice life, thank you. Regardless of her marriage, the will cuts her into her father’s ranch where she takes lessons in horsemanship, cattle management, and rustic stoicism from manager and WWII sailor Bill Champion. And, no matter how good in bed Paul may be, Evelyn sees no point in taking back a man who is carrying on with his probate officer. Paul’s probation follows a term in the state pen awarded for manslaughter when a drunk Sunny Jim ran into a motorcyclist and Paul politely took the rap, even though his father-in-law had stolen his kidney. These awfully stretched story lines wander perilously close to Florida baroque, but McGuane always knows when to back off and bring in the horses, snow, scenery, and brief moments of sanity to show the real and deeply appealing selves of Evelyn and her manly rancher role model Bill and all that excellent Big Sky country.
Exhilarating: like a good run in bad weather.Pub Date: May 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-44674-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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