A well-written and often amusing debut about what it takes to succeed or fail in love or art.
Two would-be writers embark on an affair, testing commitments to existing partners, their creative efforts, and each other in this clever morality tale.
When Peter meets Leslie, sparks fly and the dialogue crackles with irony and snark—as it often determinedly does among Martin’s small cast of well-educated artistic types. The two are around 30, and both are feeling doubt about their desire to be fiction writers. They also both have serious partners. Peter lives with Julia in Virginia, where she attends medical school and writes poetry. He teaches and tends to dither. “I preferred to do nothing. This was not Julia’s favorite aspect of my character.” Leslie has a fiance in Montana, but she is having second thoughts about the marriage and has come to Virginia to visit her aunt. Peter narrates the bulk of the tale, an anatomy of his affair with Leslie and dishonesty with Julia. (“ ‘We’re adults,’ I said, the universal verbal marker of childish behavior.”) Three sections with a third-person narrator deliver slices of Leslie’s life: a relationship with a woman in New York; how she got to know her fiance; and where she ends up. The structure is a bit creaky, though it gives Leslie some pointed limelight as a character apart from Peter—and it gives readers a break from Peter’s voice, which can be tiresome. His own narration reveals him to be irresponsible and living “[a] pantomime of commitment,” marked by steady consumption of alcohol and pot. There are nearly as many references to drinking as there are to great writers. Meanwhile, his depiction of the warm, brainy, intriguing Julia makes his treatment of her all the worse. And Leslie: Is she Peter’s muse or foil or female counterpart? Or none of the above? But that would be telling.
A well-written and often amusing debut about what it takes to succeed or fail in love or art.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-14612-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
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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