This riveting collection executes a grim autopsy on American family life.
A debut collection of short stories offers an unrelenting examination of the loneliness, helplessness, and daily cruelties of our contemporary world.
This book is composed of linked stories that pursue three families across several decades. Parker writes brutally but with humor about each family’s desperate endeavors. These are characters as unprepared for intimacy as they are for trauma. One mother, unable to face or even inform her daughters of her cancer diagnosis, directs her energies toward the elephant seals massed together on the shore near her home. The seals have come to mate and to molt, a process known as “catastrophic molting” (the story gets its title from this term), whereby the seals cast off their old skins in favor of velvety new ones. At first, the seals disgust her, but she eventually tames one and comes repeatedly to brush its molting skin away. The metaphor is apt: the woman who watches the seals is dying from melanoma and, unable to shed her own skin, distracts herself with the small comforts of keeping up appearances: powdering her nose, reapplying lipstick. Her daughter discovers her illness only when her wig is blown off in the wind. Taken together, these stories provide a vivid kaleidoscope of narratives. Characters appear as children and then reappear, later in the book, married and with children of their own. Their stories are told and retold from varying perspectives, which provide new insight into their histories in the same way that a mystery can be pieced together from new details. As Parker’s title suggests, animals and children take a central role in the book; in each story, they are the registrars of pain inflicted upon, and by, a grown-up world.
This riveting collection executes a grim autopsy on American family life.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-37013-5
Page Count: 678
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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