The first two volumes of Auster's "New York Trilogy"—City of Glass (1985) and Ghosts (1986)—used mystery-fiction formulas as the basis for avant-garde explorations of identity crisis, death wish, and other existential traumas. This concluding book offers more straightforward treatment of similar material—as a middling N.Y. writer finds happiness, then despair, by taking over the life and work of his more gifted alter ego. The unnamed narrator here is a reasonably successful young book-critic circa 1976—when he answers a plea from lovely Sophie Fanshawe: her writer-husband has disappeared, leaving Sophie with a baby, a closetful of unpublished manuscripts, and instructions on how to proceed. So the narrator, who was Fanshawe's childhood friend/soulmate, agrees to follow Fanshawe's wishes: he'll evaluate the manuscripts, arranging either for their publication or their incineration. And the result is that the narrator is soon presiding over "a small industry" of acclaimed Fanshawe works; he also marries wonderful Sophie (she gets a quickie divorce from Fanshawe, who's presumed dead), adopts her baby son, and begins work on the definitive biography of this mysterious, hitherto-unknown genius named Fanshawe. But career/domestic bliss soon sours, of course—because the narrator learns (via an enigmatic message) that Fanshawe's still alive, because research for the bio leads to the awareness that "lives make no sense." Now obsessed with locating Fanshawe, the narrator finds himself out of control—having sex with Fanshawe's mother ("fucking out of hatred"), vowing to kill Fanshawe, committing random violence, losing himself in a booze/sex binge. And finally, after realizing that Fanshawe "functioned as a trope for the death inside me," the narrator has a showdown with his elusive, cryptic alter-ego. In its first half, this is an intriguing literary-world tale, slightly unreal, yet persuasive enough to be likably reminiscent of stories by Bellow, Henry James, and many others. Then, however, murky psycho-philosophical dynamics—Camus manque—take over, much as they did in Ghosts. (The apparently autobiographical narrator says of the trilogy: "These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about.")
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1987
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sun & Moon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1987
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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