Ison’s fine writing is lost in this tale of relationship hell.
Ison’s second novel (A Child Out of Alcatraz, 1997) is a bit of a letdown—as vague and drawn out as the breakup it describes.
Al and Isabel are at it again, splitting-up, complaining to friends, assuring everyone that this time they’re really going through with it. But after only a few days on his brother’s couch, Al is back in Isabel’s gleaming apartment; however, this time the two have a plan. Unable to let go just yet, they decide to write a list of things they always meant to do together. After checking off all the items on the list, they plan to part with a sense of amicable closure. Though the idea begins well enough, with dinner on the Santa Monica Pier and a romantic evening on the roof of a hotel, soon the innocuous list becomes an orchestrated excuse for petty revenge. The two like each other well enough, have had a companionable few years together, a healthy sex life, so why split, and why the animosity? Isabel, a med student at UCLA, wants more than Al, an indie-film director who now prefers watching movies to making them. Though the two love each other, Isabel can’t imagine him at future cocktail parties, and unfortunately (hence all the reconciliations) can’t imagine her life without him. And though Ison should be praised for not turning this into the kind of romance in which the two see that all those silly differences of ambition don’t mean anything in the face of true love, the lovers appear so indifferent and disconnected that their staying or parting would seem to make little difference. Soon they are forcing each other into situations designed for discomfort, and not long after that, “accidents” start happening. When they finish the list, they decide to add more items, prolonging what is becoming a simple means to hurt the other and themselves. Though some psychological depth could be gleaned from a relationship so dependent on inertia and suffering, neither Al nor Isabel are compelling enough to make their slow descent into misery worth the bumpy ride.
Ison’s fine writing is lost in this tale of relationship hell.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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