Pretentious, overtold, and transparent—Joy mistakes literary allusion for literary merit.
A fatal hunting accident and its coverup prompt this tale of violence and revenge in the mountains of western North Carolina.
When Darl Moody, who’s poaching out-of-season deer, accidentally kills Carol “Sissy” Brewer, who’s poaching someone else’s ginseng, he knows he’s got a problem: namely Sissy’s brother, Dwayne Brewer, who steals chainsaws for a living, pulls guns on bullies in Walmart bathrooms, and spends his spare time “fieldstripping and reassembling his Colt 1911 as fast as he [can] with his eyes closed.” Darl knows Dwayne isn’t the kind of guy who'd say, “Hey man, I know you killed my brother and all, but...no hard feelings,” so he decides to bury Sissy, and he gets his friend Calvin Hooper to help. Unfortunately, they leave a breadcrumb trail, and Dwayne, whose love for Sissy was “the deepest…he’d ever known," follows it, bent on revenge. Joy’s (The Weight of This World, 2017, etc.) third novel is a fast-paced, tightly plotted thriller that falls short of its literary pretensions—in fact, it's more pretension than anything else. Dwayne, misunderstood “trash” who loves his brother and can quote the Bible, has been explicitly compared to the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Anton Chigurh of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Judge Holden of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Lester Ballard of McCarthy’s Child of God. But where these prophetic villains are classically inscrutable, Dwayne—like the rest of Joy’s novel—is the opposite. There is no human mystery. Every action, thought, and motivation is explained. To be fair, there are some competent fight scenes. And Sissy’s decomposing body is nicely visceral. And in between the melodrama and cliché, Joy does manage a few inspired local details: “as each addition rotted away, a new one was hammered together…so that slowly, through decades, the five-room shanty shifted around the property.” But for the most part this book is a sculpture of lazy sentences (“The place where he could take no more had come and gone in the blink of an eye and now here he sat little more than a husk of what he was a week before”) and prepackaged profundity (“mothers should not bury their children”).
Pretentious, overtold, and transparent—Joy mistakes literary allusion for literary merit.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-57422-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
