Ansay's strangely uninvolving third novel (after Vinegar Hill, 1994, and Sister, 1996) narrates the effects of an ostensibly supernatural occurrence on a small Wisconsin town: a faux-mystical tale that may enthrall the spiritually challenged while leaving more skeptical readers wondering what the hell it's talking about. The story begins when handsome, faithless Shawn Carpenter brings his motherless ten-year-old Gabriel to Shawn's brother's family in their hometown of Ambient (these names are symbols, folks: pay attention), and abandons the boy. It climaxes when Gabriel, an overweight, whiny misfit whose religious zeal alienates peers and adults alike, is pushed off or falls from a bridge after older teenagers torment him. Gabriel's body is later found ``brought'' ashore, in an attitude of peaceful repose consistent with Ambient's local legend that a resident ``river angel'' protects those who fall into its river (neither Ansay nor the Carpenters' neighbors bother to explain why this protective spirit neglects also to save its beneficiaries from drowning). Ansay structures the novel as a series of extended portraits of Ambient's citizens, who variously credit or are affected by this supposed evidence of benign celestial intervention. These include an unhappily married teacher who takes an immediate if inexplicable dislike to Gabriel, two of the teenagers perhaps responsible for his death, and several members of a women's prayer- and support- group that calls itself the Circle of Faith. The best character here, a crippled realtor who matter-of-factly shoulders her several burdens, and scorns the promises of faith healing, is introduced too late to inject any saving irony into the story's redundant grapplings with the possibilities of belief. Page by page, River Angel is deftly written and solidly characterized, but it doesn't add up to much. And, if you don't find yourself persuaded by Ansay's fable, you may detect more than a whiff of both Russell Banks's The Sweet Hereafter and the commercially dynamic contemporary Angelology fad. Ansay can do better than this. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15243-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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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