Despite some flaws, a worthy novel about the lost hopes and embraced hypocrisies of a self-absorbed, overhyped generation.
A debut novel about two old school pals who reunite to reminisce and confront demons past and present.
Rogers starts this novel off with a bang, with the shooting of a suicide bomber in Iraq, where Jonathan Adams, earnest boyhood friend of the narrator, Tom Walker, works as a civilian contractor spreading “the democracy gospel.” Adams returns home to the U.S., and though he’s a successful college professor and state senator, his friend Walker sees he’s profoundly chagrined and disillusioned—despite the two having grown up on Byron’s Lane in a freshly plowed subdivision of Maplewood, Ohio, the once-small town transformed during their childhood into a seemingly golden middle-class suburbia. Adams, Walker discerns, is “incapable” in his own life though “abundantly blessed” at managing others. Ominously, Adams has bought a house that’s been the scene of a series of unfortunate events, including a bullet that whizzed by his head. Adams writes it off as a wild shot by a teenage hunter, but when he begins to get strange phone calls, Walker starts to wonder. Are terrorists to blame? A whodunit undercurrent runs through the novel, though it’s largely a book of manners and discussions between two old chums as they relive their past, review botched relationships and share the shame of their youth, like when they harassed an aged local farmer done in by suburbanization and didn’t help him when he collapsed from a heart attack. Rogers’ novel has much to say about the lost promise of the babied baby boomer generation—its greed, angst, sense of entitlement, narcissism and duplicity. “It’s our generation’s moment—it’s our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define ourselves. And we’re squandering it,” laments Adams, a kind of latter-day Hubert Humphrey, the last shred of America’s dying liberal class. Rogers nicely evokes suburban anomie and angst. Occasionally, however, stilted dialogue and overwrought metaphors weaken the book: “The big, bad wolf is here and I’m the pig who built his house with straw,” Adams tells Walker. Still, much of the writing is workmanlike and sometimes even better. One bad guy is “a mouse of a boy who grew into a rat of a man.”
Despite some flaws, a worthy novel about the lost hopes and embraced hypocrisies of a self-absorbed, overhyped generation.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1626521315
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Langdon Street Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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