With as sure a hand as she used to reach in and touch the terror of family and tribal love in Love Medicine, Erdrich now captures in relatedness and friendship a startlingly Dickensian germ of comedy. Following three very eccentric friends through girlhood and into old age, the book deals with Mary Adare, her cousin Sita Kozka, and their friend Celestine James (one of the Kapshaws, readers of Love Medicine may remember), all living in the little town of Argus, North Dakota—an utterly pure nowhere. Mary comes to Argus after her mother deserts her and her brother Karl (who flits in and out of the story thereafter—a character of flimflam yet mystery); her uncle and aunt own a butcher shop there, a butcher shop Mary will eventually take over—with her friend Celestine—and run for the rest of their lives. Cousin Sita, never forgiving Mary's interloping, spends the rest of her own life putting some imaginary distance between herself and the common run-of-the-mill Argus life—but is foiled again and again, and needs to be continually rescued by Mary and Celestine. The three women are complete individuals—oddballs, in fact. And it is exactly their eccentricity that provides Erdrich with what she needs to create one funny set-piece after another: Mary assaulting Celestine's daughter Dot's grade-school teacher; Sita opening a far too fancy restaurant, the chef coming down with food-poisoning the night of the debut; Mary and Celestine pressed into cooking-services (a scene as good as the classic I Love Lucy episode with the assembly-line cakes); Sita in a mental hospital for a single night; Dot's disastrous starring-role in a school play. These strange characters are so plastic and pliable—while deeply interknit—that Erdrich doesn't have to do much than nudge them into confident motion: outrageousness comes off them like heat. John Irving has been straining at this kind of warm-color comedy for books and books now—and can't quite do it. Erdrich can—with a prose style as vivid and compelling as Love Medicine's: never cheap, never melodramatic or short-cutting. A truly lovely book—worthy successor to Love Medicine.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1986
ISBN: 0060835273
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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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