Accomplished, honest and uncompromising, but not a whole lot of fun.
Suburban motherhood is no picnic in this latest examination of intertwined lives from British novelist Cusk (The Lucky Ones, 2004, etc.).
The action takes place during a single rainy day in a well-pruned English suburb. But though its streets are tree-lined, its shops exclusive, its houses ranging from pretty to grand, Arlington Park is not entirely sheltered from the problems of the world. While dropping their older children at school and toting their toddlers around on errands, the no-longer-so-young mothers worry about impoverished gypsies, people dying of malnutrition, earthquake victims in Indonesia, ecological destruction and the four-year-old girl abducted from their own prosperous enclave. (She’s found dead toward the end, a dénouement in keeping with the novel’s generally dark tone.) Is there something they should do about these unpleasant realities? How can they help anyone else, when they feel so helplessly adrift themselves? In previous fiction, and in her poignant memoir A Life’s Work (2001), Cusk sensitively balanced an honest depiction of parenting’s often overwhelming demands with tender acknowledgment of its joys. In this book, children are nearly always a burden, husbands prompt little besides bitterness and the one protagonist who’s still working finds her job as a schoolteacher mostly a reminder of the intellectual ambitions she failed to fulfill. As usual with this deft and astute writer, the prose is elegant, the characterizations spot-on. Frustrated Juliet, obsessive Amanda, conflicted city transplant Maisie, pregnant-yet-again Solly and in particular angrily exuberant, confrontational Christine are wholly believable and uncomfortably familiar. Such is the author’s skill that few readers will be able to escape a sense of squirming empathy for these women’s frequent bouts of self-pity and vertiginous feeling of not being in control of their relatively privileged lives. The sour aftertaste their stories leave, however, is a new development in Cusk’s work—and not a welcome one.
Accomplished, honest and uncompromising, but not a whole lot of fun.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-10080-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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
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