In these handsomely crafted novellas, as in The Age of Grief (1987) and other works, Smiley (The Greenlanders, 1988) sets within the fussy patterns of familial interaction the inexplicable—sudden, volcanic surfacings of rage or desire that transform a seemingly secure life into a new landscape of compromise and sad wisdom. In "Ordinary Love," 52-year-old Rachel, divorced mother of five, grandmother of four, awaits with son Joe the arrival from India of Joe's twin Michael. "An ancient wave of terror," notes Rachel, "seems to unroll from my head downward. . .reunions are fraught with echoes." Twenty years before, Rachel had announced to heartily dominating husband Patrick that she was having an affair with Ed, a novelist and world traveller. In a day or so, Patrick had taken the children away to England, and Rachel's life in the old house with happy children had gone up in smoke. Over the years, children will come home, leave again. Now during this reunion, one of Rachel's children will exhume old griefs—a shocker, matching Rachel's delayed truthtelling about her affair long ago. Her grown-up children, bright, good—and wary—were the recipients, Rachel realizes, of "two of the cruelest gifts. . .the experience of perfect family happiness and the certain knowledge that it could not last." In "Good Will," a 20th-century paradise in Pennsylvania—self-sufficiency on the lushly producing acres of a creatively designed farm with pioneer skills of cloth- and furniture-making—contains a family of three. Yet within the self-assertion of a lively, intelligent, adored young boy lies the serpent of destruction. At the close, paradise lost, his father will accept "fragments" instead of ecosystems of being; good and evil; grief and present new directions; and a time to direct—and a time to step aside from—the inexorable growth of a child. The quiet, even, but never thin narrative voices here pace out the discovery of elusive sad truths—truths that settle in and clarify in the wake of past betrayals by the jagged furies of the ego. Smiley's best to date.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1989
ISBN: 030727909X
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1989
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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