An elegiac semi-fiction composed of short takes and longer reprints from Rolling Stone, Esquire and Kesey's own magazine, Spit in the Ocean, now orchestrated into a large work whose parts sing against each other and whose overriding theme is a magnificent dirge for the 60's. Demon Box is also a superb rounding out and bookend to all the works springing from Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). What Kerouac began Kesey has finished—and finished with great style and feeling. There are two or three Ken Keseys: the one who wrote two inspired novels (1962's marvelous One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and 1964's more daring Sometimes a Great Notion), and the one who shifted from literature to life and became a retired novelist/Oregon farmer. There is also the public Kesey, father of the Merry Pranksters, a celebrated bus-load of psychedelic rebels set on bringing America into the fourth dimension of lysergic acid, whose antics were chronicled in the pop-art prose of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It's the public Kesey we first meet here, being released from the San Marco (Cal.) County slammer after serving a six-month term for possession and cultivation of weed. This Kesey still has a prankster's aura, but that soon sours and fades, along with the famed psychedelic bus rotting on his farm. Here, Devlin E. Deboree, Kesey's alter ego, seems somewhere between a squire and a farmer. Like Henry Miller, to whom Demon Box owes a large debt, he spends a lot of time fending off unwanted hippie visitors who regard him as a national monument to unfettered freedom. Most of these rancid travelers come away unhappy with their encounter, seeing their man as a power tripper and guru gone rotten. Says one poisonous dropout, "I never read Sometimes a Cuckoo Nest but I saw the flick." Part of the time Deboree is away, on a trip to Mexico, or on a writing jaunt for Rolling Stone, searching for the riddle of the pyramids in Cairo, of marathon running to the Great Wall of China, or of madness at a psychiatrists' convention in Disney World. A highlight, however, is Kesey's great prose poem to the lost faces of the 60's ("Hello faces. Come back. Come on back all of you even LBJ with your Texas cheeks eroded by compromises come back. Khrushchev, fearless beyond peasant ignorance, healthy beside Eisenhower, come back both of you. James Dean all picked apart and Tab Hunter all put together. Michael Rennie in your silver suit the day the earth stood still for peace, come back all of you. . .").
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0140085300
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1986
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
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