Hard to get a handle on this very French-feeling, waiflike work that teases like a meal the anorexic Cynthia isn’t allowed...
A seemingly interminable (in spite of its size) and sophomoric exercise in automatic writing pursuing the existential woes of a 20-year-old escort-cum-prostitute.
She calls herself Cynthia, after the dead sister she never knew back in her religious home near the Maine border, and she entertains a loathing for her bedridden, useless mother and pious, fire-and-brimstone father. Cynthia is a student in literature at McGill University in Montreal when she answers an ad for an escort service and begins servicing up to eight men a day in a discreetly provided room with bed and bath. She prefers working the daytime, like a regular nine-to-five job, and isn’t above enjoying the earlier clients, though it’s the repetition—as she reveals in her melodramatic first-person sentences that ramble on without punctuation for pages—that’s killing. French Canadian author Arcan actually describes a few of these customers, thus elevating her debut novel above the tedious, self-loathing litany of the analysand. We meet the Sabbath Blackbird, an aged Jew dressed in black, with gray sidelocks, whom Cynthia imagines as “Moses from my catechism courses and my father’s Bible . . . honoring God in whoredom” as he masturbates to her gyrations; and Jean the Hungarian, who has a withered arm and myriad scars that, as they discuss literature, they never mention. Cynthia for the most part free-associates about the hate she feels for her yellowing mother; about her father, steeped in a fear of sex that left the daughter eternally small and infantile; about obsessions with her fleeting youth and perfection (plastic surgery helps); and about dreams of death. All these she shares with her psychoanalyst, the true love of her life, though he gives nothing, not even a response.
Hard to get a handle on this very French-feeling, waiflike work that teases like a meal the anorexic Cynthia isn’t allowed to swallow: ill-nourished fiction, overall, suggesting unconvincingly that this “caged life is the only one possible.”Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-7002-1
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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