Dr. Thomas More, Feliciana Parish psychiatrist, bad Catholic, boozy and allergic, makes a return in Percy's quasi-sequel to Love in the Ruins (1971)—and though the apocalypse seems just as certain now as it did then, things in this near-future seem somewhat calmer than were the earlier book's race wars. Euthanasia (both of helpless children and helpless oldsters) is general, AIDS and Alzheimer's patients are quarantined, and Dr. More himself has spent some time in Federal prison in Alabama for selling amphetamines to long-haul truckers (Percy's not one to put too glamorous a sheen on his heroes). But out on parole now, More notices odd findings in some of the few patients he has left, as well as in other people (including wife Ellen). They seem increasingly affectless, mindlessly well-balanced, given to specific information but not abstraction—and, weirdest of all, they are exhibiting primate-like behavior: public grooming, rear sexual presentation by females, etc. What's going on, it turns out, is a little bit of rogue socio-medical engineering by a bunch of local research doctors who are feeding heavy sodium ions into the drinking water of selected Feliciana Parish populations, and achieving spectacular results: no crime, no rape, no unemployment, no existential terrors, no alcoholism—at the price, however, of turning these people into monkeyish robots. And More—of the old school, someone who appreciates the up as well as down side of a good spiritual malaise—tracks down this Nazi-like experiment and endeavors to do something about stopping it. Percy has it all at his fingertips—the lovely character details, the ambiguous heroism of More, the fond eroticism—but maybe a little too much so: the thriller-like core of the book, tracking down and closing up the heavy-sodium project, has twice the this-and-then-that procedure it needs, half the novelistic shading; you get a sense of Percy bespelled by his own facility at writing low-brow in a high-brow framework. And like later Waugh, the comedy relies on types rather than on individual rascals (the exception is the wonderfully venal chief of the heavy-sodium doctors, Bob Comeaux). Love in the Ruins held together better, but a continuation of that book's specifically moral and at the same time antic lope is no bad thing at all; Percy fans will find it very agreeable, despite the thinness.
Pub Date: April 1, 1987
ISBN: 0312243324
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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