The struggles of the two families depicted are not always well balanced, but Piazza’s writing is so fresh and vital readers...
Piazza follows the cultural history of his adopted city (Why New Orleans Matters, 2005, etc.) with this powerfully empathetic second novel about Katrina’s impact in 2005.
His focus is two New Orleans families; one white, one black. The white Donaldsons (husband Craig, wife Alice, two small kids) are transplants from the Midwest. Craig, editor of an alternative newsmagazine, loves the city; it is his “refuge.” Alice has become disenchanted; this strains their marriage. In the predominantly black Lower Ninth Ward are the Williamses: SJ, his older sister, Lucy, and her 19-year-old son, Wesley. SJ is a third-generation Orleansian with his own carpentry and repair business. A widower, SJ has seldom dated since his wife’s death, finding salvation in work. The less disciplined Lucy battles drug and alcohol problems, and is a loving but part-time mother to Wesley. The story chronicles the time before, during and after Katrina. The Donaldsons leave town, endure horrendous traffic and wind up with distant relatives in Chicago; the Williamses stay put. The day after the hurricane SJ finds himself living in a lake; only his second floor is habitable. He commandeers a rowboat, as dead bodies float past him, and rescues neighbors; a Vietnam vet, SJ knows how to tamp down emotions. What pulls the reader in is this struggle with adversity; the sensitively portrayed Donaldsons are necessary for Piazza’s balanced, big-picture view, but their suffering is just an itch compared to the travails of the Williamses, and that’s a problem. In their confrontations with death, their accidental separation and disorienting relocations (Missouri, upstate New York), SJ, Lucy and Wesley (eventually reunited in Houston) are simply more real. The Donaldsons, after some lucky breaks, make the wrenching decision to stay in Chicago, while New Orleans, though looking post-Katrina like someone who “had had a lobotomy,” still has enough spirit to celebrate Mardi Gras.
The struggles of the two families depicted are not always well balanced, but Piazza’s writing is so fresh and vital readers will feel, all over again, the outrage at the abandonment of this beloved city.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-123861-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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