Smiley, a gifted novelist of family-relations (Born Blind, At Paradise Gate), goes murkily astray this time—in a Manhattan murder-mystery that probes, with talky stiffness, the inter-relations among an unappealing group of old Minnesota college friends, now all early-30s New Yorkers. (Not unlike The Big Chill set-up, but without the charm.) Denny Minehart and Craig Shellady, brother-like leaders of a not-quite-famous rock band, are found dead in the apartment they've shared for years with Denny's longtime lover, boutique-manager Susan Gabriel. The shocked discoverer of the bodies: Susan's best friend Alice Ellis—librarian, ex-wife of poet/prof Jim, and the novel's moody heroine. Whodunit? Was it another band-member, druggie Noah Mast, whose wife was sleeping with the charismatic, volatile Craig? Did something go wrong with a cocaine-selling deal arranged by another old pal, homosexual sound-man Ray? Or was the killer one of the many other people who had keys to the Denny/Craig/Susan apartment? Alice, a quiet type uncomfortable at the center of the ensuing tensions, mulls these possibilities, raking over past relationships—often in numbing conversations with strong, glamorous Susan. ("Well, doesn't all of this seem weird to you? The patterns of our lives formed twelve years ago! And they didn't basically change until now!") Alice also finds time to fall in love—cute talk, earnest sex—with botanist/neighbor Henry, even if (for unconvincing reasons) she can't bear to tell him about the murders. But then, while Noah is indeed arrested, Alice suddenly, intuitively knows that Susan committed the murders. ("Nonetheless, Alice knew that her adoration of her friend, and her anticipation of lasting, comfortable intimacy was greater than ever.") So this disturbing knowledge will mess up the Henry relationship. . . until a longwinded finale (Susan stalks Alice, Susan confesses), paves the way for a tinny, happy fadeout. Smiley extracts a few shrewd effects from the quiet, naturalistic approach to violence and grief: there's ironic, credible emphasis on what everybody eats and wears. Her prose is often stylish, thoughtful. But, unlike Barn Blind and At Paradise Gate, this novel is layered with artificial situations and implausible motivations—from Alice's tortured friendships to Susan's much-belabored murder motive (which relates to the undeveloped theme of the rock band's non-celebrity). Moreover, Smiley doesn't seem to know this world first-hand: details and dialogue lack authentic edges. A blurry, ambitious cluster of themes, then, never coming into focus—or rising above the murder-melodrama format.
Pub Date: March 1, 1983
ISBN: 1400076021
Page Count: 355
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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