A little more variation from expectation would have been welcome. Still, a well-intended and welcome first effort.
Musicians can be a handful. Even folk musicians. That’s not news—but it’s news you can use, courtesy of Belcher’s modest debut.
“What the hell happened to Eli Page?” You might as well have a T-shirt made with the question emblazoned on both sides, for Eli Page, the dark heart of the story, is a bibulous, cantankerous, but beguiling troubadour whose soap-operatic life includes spells of Dylan-esque disappearance and Morrison-ian mayhem. Enter “John Wyeth of nowhere special,” as Eli dubs the young man who stage-manages him through what could have been a disastrous performance. It’s not exactly My Favorite Year, but if you’ve seen that wonderful film in a double feature with Inside Llewyn Davis, you’ll have some idea of the setup. Belcher enriches what in turn could have been an overly broad yarn with a more specific narrowing of the stage as Jack moves to Eli’s small town to help him work through his archives and memory banks in a “ghostwriting gig,” with some mentoring in the fine art of how to be a folkie on the side. Jack’s no schmo, but he’s a little hapless, and as he lands square into Eli’s messes he makes some of his own; as Eli grumbles, midway through the book, “You move to town, live with me, and start up with [the town cop’s] fiancée. That’s three strikes.” One wishes Belcher had a slightly more seasoned view of small-town life of the sort that Richard Russo and the late Kent Haruf so ably drew from; there’s not much that sets his leafy town apart from any other. And while a musician as nice and even-keeled as, say, Donovan probably wouldn’t fuel a good old conflict-driven story, and there’s plenty of conflict here, Eli rather too neatly checks all the boxes of what a dissolute, world-weary musician—and is there any other kind?—is supposed to be like.
A little more variation from expectation would have been welcome. Still, a well-intended and welcome first effort.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-746-8
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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