A brilliant must-read from Martin (The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, 2006, etc.), who captures the zeitgeist of...
What seems at first a tightly focused domestic drama about a middle-aged couple’s reaction to their son’s new girlfriend broadens onto a large socio-political canvas as liberal values run smack into fear of foreign invasiveness.
Chloe, an illustrator working on an edition of Wuthering Heights, and her history professor husband, Brendan, researching a book about the Crusades, live in a comfortably rural setting outside Manhattan. The two are typically self-satisfied, self-aware members of the left-leaning bourgeoisie. Chloe in particular prides herself on her open-mindedness, but she is immediately put off when only son Toby, a junior at NYU, introduces his exotic new girlfriend Salome, with whom he is clearly besotted. Salome, a scholarship student who immigrated to Louisiana with her father and brother after her mother and other brother were killed in Croatia, strikes Chloe as judgmental and possibly predatory. More sanguine, Brendan recognizes with nostalgia the sexual frisson between Salome and Toby. Chloe’s unease rises when Toby and Salome start living together. Salome becomes pregnant; she and Toby decide to marry; and all Chloe’s alarms go off. At the same time, she feels increasingly threatened by a foreign trespasser who has been shooting rabbits on her land and may or may not have committed several other invasive, violent acts. With Iraq an ever-present backdrop, Martin builds a discomforting sense of menace: Is Chloe paranoid or is the threat real? Even Toby fights his doubts about Salome, especially when she disappears the day after their marriage. She’s gone to Trieste to find her mother, who is not dead after all—she tells her story in italicized fragments throughout the novel. Toby soon follows Salome. After Chloe sends Brendan to intervene, her worst fears are realized, however inadvertently, at home and abroad.
A brilliant must-read from Martin (The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, 2006, etc.), who captures the zeitgeist of contemporary America within a deeply personal context.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51545-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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