Promising start; disappointing finish.
Glimpses of a hidden world from the award-winning author of Drifting House (2012).
Lee’s debut novel begins at a party in Pyongyang. Government officials and celebrities show off Rolex watches and fur coats. They eat fish imported from Tokyo, they toast their Dear Leader with Chivas Regal, and they watch girls in hot pants dance to forbidden American pop. It’s a surreal display of wealth and privilege overshadowed by terror. These elites are protected from the famine and despair that plague their country, but they're still subject to the whims of a mercurial, all-powerful dictator. This scene is narrated by a young man, Yongju, and it culminates in the assassination of his father. This fall from grace leads to an escape into China, and that’s where he meets the novel’s other narrators. Danny is Korean by heritage, Chinese by birth, and a permanent resident of the United States. While visiting his Christian missionary mother back in China, he runs away, is robbed of his passport, and joins a group of other young outcasts in order to survive. Jangmi is a young North Korean woman who smuggles herself across the border to marry a Chinese man; she’s forced to flee her new home when this man realizes she’s pregnant with someone else's child. The best parts of this book are in its beginning. The banquet where Yongju’s father is assassinated, for instance, is quite particular in its weirdness and horror. Jangmi’s reaction to the bounty she finds in China is both an appreciation and a critique of consumerism. And the ways in which all these characters must confront prejudice are interesting. All too soon, though, their stories converge into a tale of survival that is both familiar and flat. Lee barely explores the contrast between Yongju’s sheltered upbringing and the depredations he endures in China. Hunger and homelessness are also surprisingly easy for Danny, a kid from the suburbs of southern California. Only Jangmi’s travails are believable and compelling.
Promising start; disappointing finish.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02568-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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