An uneven road-trip tale that attempts to take readers straight to the heart of America.
In this debut novel, a lost man finds that the best way to get to the facts is through fiction.
Following college, Landfair’s unnamed narrator buys a motorcycle that he doesn’t quite know how to ride. He resolves to find himself by exploring his native land and learning about its character. However, neither his years as a benchwarmer for his college baseball team nor his ROTC training adequately prepare him for the harsh realities of life on the road. There are bitter winters to contend with, highway robberies, homelessness and all manner of other hardships. The protagonist’s impetus for his journey seems to stem from unfulfilled dreams of glory, and not from a deep-rooted desire to better understand the U.S. of A. Yet he rarely reexamines his quest, even when adversities mount. Although others might have turned back and sought comfort with friends and family, he presses on, eager for the next adventure. Along the way, he picks up odd jobs—as everything from a community organizer to a building superintendent—to pay his way. But his real payment comes in the form of stories that people tell him. When he crosses paths with Sam, a carnival operator and consummate showman, he begins to nurture his own knack for storytelling. Suddenly, the yarns he spins help him find his way into the good graces of those he meets during his travels. He learns to adapt his own experiences and those of others into larger-than-life legends, and before long, he’s selling out venues as a bona fide American hero—a Daniel Boone, of sorts. Throughout, Landfair’s evocative prose places the reader on the seemingly endless highways and byways of our expansive country (“Cars sped past on either side—blurs of headlights and turn signals”). However, for all of its focus on trying to understand the American spirit, the novel fails to divulge very much information about its main character. Readers know that he’s on a quest, but it remains unclear what his real motivations are. Although readers spend a lot of time with him, they’re always riding shotgun, never really getting a peek below the surface. Intriguingly, the story’s trajectory is eastward, reversing the usual trend for this type of road story, but in the end, its resolution is no surprise.
An uneven road-trip tale that attempts to take readers straight to the heart of America.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1940500355
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Harbinger Book Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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