A wearyingly discursive if often very funny fictional autobiography in the form of a diary kept by the less accomplished of a proud progressive couple's deeply divergent twin sons. William, the elder (by seven minutes), grows up in the 1960s in Cambridge, Mass., among a ``distracted, quasi-Bohemian family'' that includes his cheerful, universally admired prodigy brother Clive, and parents who lovingly encourage healthful nudity and candid family discussions of adolescent masturbation and other (preferably, William would say) guilty secrets. William, who demonstrates precocity only as a curmudgeon, is in fact his exemplary brother's intellectual equal (perhaps superior). But he delights in disappointing others' expectations (for reasons never really made clear). In a skimpy chronological narrative that's nevertheless buoyed by Anastas's gift for offbeat comic phrasing, we learn of William's successive disgraces as a slow learner of the basics of infancy and childhood (in the matter of toilet training, for example, he grunts and strains inefficiently in contrast to Clive, ``a Green Beret in diapers''); a sickly adolescent who pines for beauteous schoolmate Faith Crick (Clive's girlfriend, naturally) but is usually paired with elephantine Dorothea Zimmerman; a private-school failure at ``bootcamp-style intramural sports'' and a sexual misfit who rejects his brother's offers to help him lose his virginity . . . on and on it goes, through quickly sketched college experiences, when William has a drinking problem and a girlfriend ``prone to short disappearances, broken dates and lapses of memory that included my name.'' Inconclusive further adventures in San Francisco and New York City precede the abandonment of William's diary (another task he can't complete). One wants to keep quoting, but not necessarily to keep reading what's essentially a (pretty good) one-joke book. This is, however, on balance a first novel in need of a plot.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-31998-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
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