by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2013
An ambitious novel in which the formalistic chances taken by the author are often stimulating and occasionally exasperating.
Over the course of a prolific career, Everett (Assumption, 2011, etc.) has conditioned readers to expect the unexpected, but this novel is not only his most challenging to date, it sheds fresh light on his previous work.
The title would seem to suggest that this is a novel about the author by a fictitious pseudonym, but the main significance of “Percival Everett” is the dedication to the author’s father, who died in 2010 at the age of 77. And there is an unnamed character in the novel of that age, whose son is an artist. Or a doctor. And who has different names over the course of the novel. And who may in fact be writing the narrative about his father. Unless it is the father writing about the son. Or one of them is imagining what the other would write. Or, as the novel explains, “I’m an old man or his son writing an old man writing his son writing an old man.” Within that narrative labyrinth, the novel is much more than an academic exercise (the author is also a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California), as it searches for the possibility of meaning in life as well as narrative and meditates on the process of aging and the inevitability of death. “This whole process of making a story, a story at all, well, it’s the edge of something, isn’t it? Forth and back and back of forth, it’s a constant shuttle movement, ostensibly looking to comply with some logic, someone’s logic, my logic, law, but subverting it the entire time,” writes the author (or someone). It’s audacious for such literary playfulness to engage such serious themes as meaning and mortality, but the novel proceeds to try the reader’s patience with some extraordinarily long sentences and dense chapters.
An ambitious novel in which the formalistic chances taken by the author are often stimulating and occasionally exasperating.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-55597-634-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
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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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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