Percy's fifth novel is tightly bound to the theme of his other four: Why is a person nowadays "two percent of himself"? Why are we all so unhappy? And it's most especially and clearly linked to his second (and perhaps best) book, The Last Gentleman. Here, grown older and incomparably richer (having married a cheerful, fat, crippled heiress who died), is again Will Barrett—who's still having spells and blacking out ("petty-mall" attacks, his doctor/golf-partner calls them). But now Will is coming out of those spells into a reality that includes the 30 or 40 million dollars he has; a grown, born-again daughter; and the slowly sharpening, interweaving memory of his father, on a hunting trip with boy Will, trying to kill them both on purpose. Then—to complement Will's abstracted search for what the hell it all comes out to—Percy brings on Allie, a girl in her twenties (who is later revealed as the daughter of Will's old flame from The Last Gentleman, Kitty). Allie, shock-treated and not about to be zapped again, has escaped from a sanitarium and taken shelter in an abandoned North Carolina greenhouse adjacent to Will's property. There's not much that she can remember about the business of the world—how to talk to people, for instance—but she gets along with the help of elemental physics (blocks, hoists, and tackles are needed to fix up the greenhouse) and conundrum-like speech that only Will, when they accidentally meet, seems to understand and appreciate. Two slates, then: one overfilled (Will), one about empty (Allie)—and Percy takes it gleefully from there. As with any Percy novel, the wealths here are almost humbling: the spookily precise descriptions of odd physical sensations; the satire on the complacent and dead modern South; the rage and the Kierkegaardian comic curiosity. ("The present day unbeliever is crazy as well as being an asshole—which is why he is a bigger asshole than the Christian because a crazy asshole is worse than a sane asshole.') True, there are sections in which these not-always-meshing attributes go on too long, saved only by Percy's enormous charm as a stylist; it's a generally slow book, wide-seamed. And the lack of any great advance in characterization does not lend a what-comes-next? anticipation. But this is Percy, our cool Dostoevsky, totally at his leisure (as he wasn't in Lancelot), more personal than ever before (the father-son flashbacks are fine)—and, page for page, there's more acute fiction and better prose here than you're likely to find anywhere else in American writing today.
Pub Date: July 7, 1980
ISBN: 0312243243
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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