Szalay has written a book about a man who is not unlike the rest of us, a swirling mass of contradictions, of good...
Man Booker Prize finalist Szalay’s (All That Man Is, 2016, etc.) debut novel, originally published in Britain in 2008, is a satire that turns into something more.
At first glance, Szalay's novel reads as something of a portrait of the gone world, with its protagonist, a London advertising salesman named Paul Rainey, trying to nail down a pre-Brexit deal with a German medical client. What makes the narrative pop, though, is its understanding that not all that much has changed between then and now, at least not in the lives of people such as Paul. An alcoholic (“he spends perhaps two hundred pounds a week on alcohol alone,” the author tells us) and a pothead, Paul is also a devoted father figure to his stepson, Oliver, a snooker prodigy. More to the point, he's trying to keep his head above water, to take care of his responsibilities. The novel starts out reminiscent of Martin Amis’ Money, a satire on the advertising and entertainment industries. Quickly, however, it becomes a more nuanced portrait of desire and its discontents, akin to a novel by Martin’s father, Kingsley: Lucky Jim. Like Amis père, Szalay writes with real heart about his protagonist—a man lost in the middle of his own existence, insufficient in love or ambition, unable to live up to what he wants. At the same time, Paul manages to get if not exactly what he wants, then at least what he might need. After a scheme to acquire a new job goes wrong, he is left to make ends meet in whatever way he can. But while Szalay flirts with a variety of expected dissolutions, he ultimately has something more complex in mind. For Paul, losing his job turns out to be the best thing that could have happened, not because it makes life easier but because he has no choice but to engage. “What would happen,” the character wonders, “if he were to walk out, and stay out. What would he do?” The answer is that he cannot, that he needs this ramshackle life even as it confounds him: disconnections, disappointments, and all.
Szalay has written a book about a man who is not unlike the rest of us, a swirling mass of contradictions, of good intentions and less good actions: eager, desperate even, to make the best of circumstance.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-793-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
