Five short stories and a novella by the author of Duplicate Keys (1984) and At Paradise Gate (1981), all celebrating, in one way or another, what Smiley in the novella dubs "The Age of Grief"—that time in middle age, "after all that schooling, all that care," when coming around to you is "the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from." The protagonist here is a 35-year-old dentist, a husband and professional partner of a dramatically achieving wife, a father of three young daughters, and a contented tinkerer with "tiny machines, itsy bitsy pieces of cotton"—small things for a small life? He enters the Age of Grief when he becomes aware that his wife has a lover, and the future he'd always counted on "walking into" drops away. He probes the ties and trivia of family, and his own unexamined psycho-physical being, which erratically transmits grief and rage, and he confronts mortality in the terrifying illness of a child. As for marriage, it is "a small container" that two "inner lives" can burst or deform. The short stories, meanwhile, evolve some sad little truths. A cherished frienship with a married couple upends as careless exploitation. In "Lily," another hapless, unwitting intruder in a marriage pays a price. A reluctant visitor to his brother's Christmas celebration comes to recognize, in the failure' and fading of a long-distance love affair, his own "permanent smallness." Even a maker of bombs for a radical group admits—now that she's quit—that looking at the other side of the "firm shape of my life" reveals motives "trival, unimportant." "Jeffrey, Believe Me" is an amusing burlesque, poking fun at the female-seducer stereotype—here it's very hard work indeed, all for a swim in the gene pool. Smiley writes with a sound emotive control that shapes into firm tone and meaning the widely browsing meditations of her characters. And there is that memorable and sobering perspective—when vision changes from the far distance to the near reality of a life suddenly grown shriveled and, alas, permanently small.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1987
ISBN: 0385721870
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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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