Well-written, but readers will struggle to care about the fates of Clyde, the Smalls or any of the other characters.
For his debut novel, Harvkey gathers together an odd band of malcontents and down-on-their-luck types in this tale of a man who believes he has run out of options and the people who offer him one.
Clyde Twitty is a man on the downswing. He’s lost a job and most of his pride and lives with his elderly mother in a depressed area of Missouri. The day-to-day struggle of trying to hold on to their little home, which is also the base of his mother’s beauty salon business, has left the young man as worn and disillusioned as his old uncle Willie, who lives in a mobile home with his ancient dog. But then Clyde meets the Smalls family: patriarch Jay, an odd man with a pushy personality; Jan, his big-busted wife; and Tina Louise, their teenage daughter. Jay bullies Clyde into learning karate from him, and Tina makes him her lover, quickly integrating the impressionable Clyde into their large clan of cousins and followers. But there is more to the Smalls than meets the eye, and it’s not simply the fact that Tina Louise sells Amway. They’ve launched a war on everyone they consider an enemy, and in their book, a lot of people and groups fall into that category. Soon, Clyde is knee-deep in violence, and there’s no looking back, and what he finds out about himself, and the subsequent direction his life takes, is fodder for Harvkey’s pen. Harvkey is clearly a talented writer, but his subject matter is disheartening. Not everyone will want to climb inside the head of someone as clearly out of control as Jay Smalls, and those who do might find the story more depressing than the reality upon which it is based.
Well-written, but readers will struggle to care about the fates of Clyde, the Smalls or any of the other characters.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-294-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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