A compelling, spare story that portrays its ugly, oil-disaster future as crude in more ways than one.
In a world ravaged by cataclysmic oil blowouts, a vagrant survivor witnesses the cruelties of a degraded civilization in Cheney’s (So I Can See the Trees, 2013) dystopian novel.
In 2031, members of a messianic terrorist group called CRUD simultaneously blow up oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and across Canada, unleashing an extinction-level flood of petroleum. It wipes out much of civilization, at least in North America, ushering in a new, literal dark age as pollutant-saturated clouds blot out the sun. Earthquakes are frequent, respiratory disease is rampant, and oil is everywhere. The stripped-down prose in this novel follows Bird, a nondescript everyman-survivor with no special agenda or aim as he wanders the wastes, tangling often with the results of “Stadium Culture,” a brute-jock version of society. Here, city-center sports arenas comprise the last organized community, where tuneless marching bands are part of the elite and the main activities are continual public executions (via impaling) and death matches against maddened woolly mammoths—a species revived from the ancient past by genetic engineering, right before everything went wrong. At one point, a sadistic, pinheaded boss is also described as being genetically modified—part of a botched attempt to create a master race. Bird, whose most distinguishing feature as a character is that he isn’t driven by nonstop urges to hurt people, briefly becomes the companion/protector of a mystery woman and an infant. Overall, the ecologically-minded author Cheney offers a grim, dystopic narrative that takes a page from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. It will likely remind many readers of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), with its terse, semi-poetic descriptions, often of unspeakable violence, in a nihilistic, post-apocalyptic world. Although the caricatures of Red-Staters verge on deadpan satire, the minimal storyline doesn’t overstay its welcome. Indeed, it even shows signs of being an allegory in which a bruised and abused Earth finally turns on the Homo sapiens who have caused it so much pain.
A compelling, spare story that portrays its ugly, oil-disaster future as crude in more ways than one.Pub Date: April 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-72523-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: The Cabin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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