It's been noticed by historians that when centuries turn they also encourage lots of end-of-the-world fantasies and falderal. O'Brien (Going After Cacciato, 1978) seems here to have fleshed out a brace of short stories, then made of this novel-length amalgam something that tries to be explosive—with a big, long fuse of apocalypticism. But this centerless, flogged-on, and jerry-built bomb of a book just sits there and fizzles, on and on and on. . . Short story #1—and the better of the two—concerns the youth of William Cowling. We see him in 1995, as he's digging an enormous hole outside his Montana home, not precisely sure whether he means to hide himself and his family in it before a nuclear holocaust—or whether he means to bring that about himself. What's clear, though, is that William has always been nuke-spooked. As a child in the Fifties, he fashioned a shelter for himself from a ping-pong table covered with lead pencils; such behavior moved his parents to take him to a psychologist even more spooked than William was. The period flavor here is outstanding innocence meeting infinity in nightmare. Short-story #2, which accounts for much more of the book, is unfortunately another matter. Here it's William gone to college in Montana, meeting up with Sarah Stouch, a cheerleader who, under the relentless pressures of the Vietnam-era, moves from pom-poms to clandestine arms-hoarding and terrorism. William and Sarah cleave to one another despite his better sense—but the scenes of their terrorist activities have to be some of the least credible, most cardboard in recent fiction. Sarah is too mercurial, William too sappy; the other characters are out of a comic book, without a hint of the truly murderously dangerous ineptitude of the kind in a book like, say, Max Crawford's The Bad Communist. Plot-shoots invariably seem forced; William has a consciousness that streams but never dams; and O'Brien's obviously strenuous effect at the end seems all to be for this: "What's wrong with me? Why am I alone? Why is there no panic? Why haven't governments been toppled? Why do we tolerate our own extinction? Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads? Why don't we scream it? Nuclear war!" This book—elaborately cobbled-up but weightless, trivial—almost answers these questions perfectly.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1985
ISBN: 0140259104
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1985
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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