Well-crafted tales from a laudable tradition, though Ravenal might encourage more experimental voices next time.
A mixed bag of 18 mostly unsurprising stories by names both celebrated and more regionally obscure in the 19th installment of this well-established series.
As usual, series editor Ravenel aims for a broad readership with stories ranging from the generic writing-program sort (Michael Knight’s blithely paced account of a divorced father’s kidnapping of his young daughter, “Feeling Lucky”; Bret Anthony Johnston’s lachrymose and rather derivative “The Widow”) to more truly weird tales informed by innate southern proclivities for dogs, church signs, and General Lee (in, respectively, Ann Pancake’s “Dog Song,” Drew Perry’s delightful “Love is Gnats Today,” and R.T. Smith’s forlorn visit to the Lee Chapel in “Docent”). What makes this collection specifically southern? Tim Gautreaux in his preface suggests love for their region and for storytelling as salient traits. “A Rich Man,” which first appeared in The New Yorker (the others were published in literary magazines across the country), meets these criteria: The language is colloquial and stylistically unforced, the characters quirky and richly depicted, as Edward P. Jones shows his elderly protagonist taking up a life as a swinger and drug dealer following his wife’s death after 50 years of marriage mostly living in the same apartment house in Washington, DC. But not every story fits the mold; two that stand out in a most welcome fashion from the conventional selections are Brock Clarke’s edgy “The Lolita School,” delineating the curriculum of a “alternative country day school of some sort” in South Carolina that will mold young girls into Nabokov’s seductive heroine, and Elizabeth Seydel Morgan’s “Saturday Afternoon in the Holocaust Museum,” which follows an estranged couple's trek through a Richmond afternoon. Each author was asked to offer commentary on his or her story, which many find an unfortunate invasion of their fictional space: “I have trouble remembering whether much in my life was fact or imagined,” notes “Pagan” author Rick Bass in discomfort).
Well-crafted tales from a laudable tradition, though Ravenal might encourage more experimental voices next time.Pub Date: June 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-432-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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