It’s better than Blonde (2000). But that’s a little like saying that Plato’s Timaeus goes down easier than the Parmenides.
Oates’s fat new opus (her 29th full-length novel, if anyone is still counting) traces the effects of an inscrutable sculptor’s benign personality and aura on a townful of admirers who find their lives permanently altered by the memory of him.
Adam Berendt, the mystery man of the prosperous upstate New York village of Salthill-on-Hudson, suffers fatal cardiac arrest while attempting to save a drowning child. The several (mostly married) women who had adored his playful, provocative intellect and perversely attractive physical ugliness (including one blind eye) react variously to the loss of their social circle’s very own Socrates (for Oates makes it explicit: even giving Adam a faithful dog named Apollodoros, after the real Socrates’s dutiful young companion). Neurasthenic divorcée Abigail Des Pres works through a borderline-incestuous fixation on her surly teenaged son. Thirtyish bookstore owner Marina Troy becomes the surprised beneficiary of Adam’s whimsical largesse. Adam’s attorney Roger Cavanagh battles his embittered ex-wife and accusatory adolescent daughter, while enduring sexual fixations on both the unresponsive Marina (who soon moves away) and a feisty feminist paralegal. Timid Camille Hoffmann soothes her loneliness by “mothering” a brood of abandoned canines (including, of course, “Apollo”), and Rubens-like beauty Augusta Cutler (the Shelley Winters part) travels the country deciphering the mystery of Adam’s past. As in Oates’s Broke Heart Blues (1999), the oracle proves something less than his acolytes had imagined. Still, all ends more or less affirmatively (this being a “romance”); there’s even a climactic reconciliation in a fabricated Garden of Eden. Middle Age has its moments, but it’s basically redundant and shapeless (Oates is still introducing new material barely ten pages prior to its end), and very heavily indebted to Plato’s numerous portrayals of Socrates (caves and shadows loom up frequently), several Iris Murdoch novels (Revered Charismatic Figure Shapes Lives of Those Who Loved Him), and especially John Updike’s Couples (Salthill=Tarbox?; and the concluding chapters contain multiple echoes of Couples’s denouement).
It’s better than Blonde (2000). But that’s a little like saying that Plato’s Timaeus goes down easier than the Parmenides.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-620946-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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