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
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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