Solid civil rights–era fiction; well worth a read.
A coming-of-age novel set in the rural South during the civil rights era.
Orphaned as a boy and raised by Aunt Ethel and Uncle Gordon in a small town outside of New Orleans, John W. Archer is small and serious and sees himself as different from everyone else. His best friend is the similarly disenfranchised Crawford Smith. Despite their mutual aloofness, they develop a firm friendship and become brothers “in every way that matters.” After a slow start to the novel—which in retrospect seems designed to sketch out the architecture of the boys’ friendship but is nevertheless, on first reading, a bit unfocused—the narrative zeroes in on Crawford’s complicated relationship with his uncle Hal Crawford and the complexities of both boys’ love interests. Hal is an outlier in their small town, living in “nigger town” and working as a civil rights lawyer during a time when segregation was the law and lynchings were not yet a thing of the past. Both boys are smart and honorable, and they see that the way things are is not the way they should be. Still, they struggle with whether their future is—like Hal’s—to stay and live and love within their imperfect world, striving in some way to improve it, or to escape, via college, to a more progressive world. The answers aren’t obvious, and in fact, the boys’ choices flip-flop as they struggle to be true to themselves and to live within the expectations handed down to them by teachers, girlfriends, parents, the formidable Aunt Ethel, and Hal, who, for all his talk about following one’s own path, is ultimately more interested in having others follow his path. Cheevers (The Able Seaman’s Mate, 2013, etc.) has a gift for dialogue, and much of the novel is composed of animated, often funny, back and forth between John, Crawford, and Hal. He’s less skilled with moments of action, focusing somewhat dispassionately, for instance, on the logistics of the novel’s climactic scene, to the extent that it reads like a series of stage directions: so-and-so raises his hand to strike, such-and-such dodges, so-and-so gets in between, such-and-such holds so-and-so back. Still, Cheever deals effectively with big ideas, and his characters are both authentic and sympathetic, investing the reader in the choices that they make and the ways they test and express their loyalties to each other and to the world around them.
Solid civil rights–era fiction; well worth a read.Pub Date: July 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500485276
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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