Szalay has written a book about a man who is not unlike the rest of us, a swirling mass of contradictions, of good...
Man Booker Prize finalist Szalay’s (All That Man Is, 2016, etc.) debut novel, originally published in Britain in 2008, is a satire that turns into something more.
At first glance, Szalay's novel reads as something of a portrait of the gone world, with its protagonist, a London advertising salesman named Paul Rainey, trying to nail down a pre-Brexit deal with a German medical client. What makes the narrative pop, though, is its understanding that not all that much has changed between then and now, at least not in the lives of people such as Paul. An alcoholic (“he spends perhaps two hundred pounds a week on alcohol alone,” the author tells us) and a pothead, Paul is also a devoted father figure to his stepson, Oliver, a snooker prodigy. More to the point, he's trying to keep his head above water, to take care of his responsibilities. The novel starts out reminiscent of Martin Amis’ Money, a satire on the advertising and entertainment industries. Quickly, however, it becomes a more nuanced portrait of desire and its discontents, akin to a novel by Martin’s father, Kingsley: Lucky Jim. Like Amis père, Szalay writes with real heart about his protagonist—a man lost in the middle of his own existence, insufficient in love or ambition, unable to live up to what he wants. At the same time, Paul manages to get if not exactly what he wants, then at least what he might need. After a scheme to acquire a new job goes wrong, he is left to make ends meet in whatever way he can. But while Szalay flirts with a variety of expected dissolutions, he ultimately has something more complex in mind. For Paul, losing his job turns out to be the best thing that could have happened, not because it makes life easier but because he has no choice but to engage. “What would happen,” the character wonders, “if he were to walk out, and stay out. What would he do?” The answer is that he cannot, that he needs this ramshackle life even as it confounds him: disconnections, disappointments, and all.
Szalay has written a book about a man who is not unlike the rest of us, a swirling mass of contradictions, of good intentions and less good actions: eager, desperate even, to make the best of circumstance.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55597-793-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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