Powerfully affecting and disturbing.
A young man dying of AIDS returns to his Ohio hometown, where people think homosexuality is a sin and the disease is divine punishment.
Brian left Chester when he was 18, seeking freedom to be who he was in New York City. Now, in 1986, he’s 24, his partner and virtually all of their friends are dead, and he’s moving into the disease’s late stages. “He turned his back on his family to live a life of sin and he’s sick because of it,” thinks his mother, Sharon; nonetheless she says yes when Brian asks if he can come home after years of estrangement. His father, Travis, insists they must keep Brian’s illness and sexuality a secret; he makes Sharon set aside tableware and bedclothes exclusively for their son and wash them separately wearing gloves. Sickels (The Evening Hour, 2012) doesn’t gloss over the shame Brian’s family feels nor the astonishing cruelty of their friends and neighbors when word gets out. Brian’s ejection from the local swimming pool is the first in a series of increasingly ugly incidents: vicious phone calls, hate mail to the local newspapers, graffiti on the family garage, a gunshot through the windshield of his father’s car. Grandmother Lettie is Brian’s only open defender, refusing to speak to friends who ostracize him and boycotting the diner that denied him service. Younger sister Jess, taunted at school, wishes he’d never come home and tells him so. This unvarnished portrait of what people are capable of when gripped by ignorance and fear is relieved slightly by a few cracks in the facade of the town’s intolerance, some moments of kindness or at least faint regret as Brian’s health worsens over the summer and fall. Sharon and Travis both eventually acknowledge they have failed their son; she makes some amends while he can only grieve. Sickels’ characters are painfully flawed and wholly, believably human in their failings. This unflinching honesty, conveyed in finely crafted prose, makes for a memorable and unsettling novel.
Powerfully affecting and disturbing.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-938235-62-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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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