Prizewinning storywriter Meloy (Half in Love, 2002) pushes every melodramatic hot button with disarming understatement.
A multigenerational first novel told with remarkable compression and precision.
Devoutly Catholic Yvette defies her family to marry Teddy shortly before he ships out as a WWII pilot. Although the Santerres’ early happiness in California sours due to Teddy’s inevitable jealousy—though always true to him, Yvette radiates sexuality—they do have two daughters. When adolescent Margot is seduced by a dance teacher, Yvette packs her off to relatives in France, tells Teddy she herself is the pregnant one, then decamps to a convent to cover her lie until the baby is born. Margot, who never acknowledges Jamie as her son, is later unable to bear the children she and her kindly if sketchily drawn husband desperately want. Meanwhile, Margot’s rebellious younger sister Clarissa dotes on Jamie, whom she assumes is her baby brother, but then she runs away with a ’60s-style idealistic, self-centered law student. Yvette’s warning that he’ll make Clarissa unhappy proves true, and when he puts his blossoming political career ahead of family, Clarissa divorces him. By now, Jamie, a troubled youth, has left Yvette and Teddy’s home after a major blow-up. He moves in with Clarissa and helps raise her daughter Abby (who adores her uncle—really her cousin), until she leaves for college. A couple of years later, at a family reunion, Abby and Jamie have sex (while Clarissa begins a lesbian relationship). Abby gets pregnant and soon after is diagnosed with cancer. Although Clarissa and Jamie have both lapsed from their Catholic faith, Abby demands to be baptized. She dies soon after she gives birth, and Jamie, officially only the godfather, raises the child. The secrets the Santerres keep in failed attempts to protect each other gradually unravel even as some of them find private happiness. Finally, Yvette’s murder draws the family together.
Prizewinning storywriter Meloy (Half in Love, 2002) pushes every melodramatic hot button with disarming understatement.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4435-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© 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.
