A rollicking satire.
A happy-go-lucky polygamist weds his way through post-war American history in this bawdy picaresque.
Setting out from the Idaho orphanage where he was raised (and sexually tutored), 16-year-old Shiver Me Timbers (other porn-ish aliases include Casper Wyoming and John Doe) confronts the 1960s with nothing but callow good looks and a ready-for-anything attitude. The sex-starved women of America are waiting for him, and the result over the ensuing decades is 12 marriages and countless extramarital couplings with everyone from an evangelical Nixon-supporter to a Betsy Ross impersonator. Shiver marries for love, money or the hell of it, and moves on because of boredom or gunfire. (He’s a Catholic, so, of course, he never gets divorced.) His wives run the gamut—there’s the flower child who joins the Symbionese Liberation Army, the pre-op transsexual in deep with the mob, the three simultaneous wives whom he picks up as a traveling vacuum-cleaner salesman and juggles until they become deranged from sniffing hog pheromones and, yes, the 14-toed lesbian heiress who tries to kill him on their wedding night. Von Osten regales readers with gonzo misadventures—captured by naked druids, Shivers narrowly avoids becoming a virgin sacrifice by demonstrating that he is not a virgin—in prose that fairly chortles with coy salaciousness. (“‘Does it hurt?’ Dolores cooed, observing my youthful vigor while moving her hands from tending her own rose garden.”) But Shivers’ relationships are so sketchy that the narrative often wanders away—to digressions on everything from the Bermuda triangle, to Ernest Hemingway’s Paris days, to local travelogue (“Philadelphia hosted both the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress”), to anti-imperialist soap-boxing against every foreign-policy misdeed from the annexation of Hawaii to Operation Desert Storm. Von Osten has a time-honored satirical mission—to deflate America’s pretenses by revealing a panorama of lust and greed—but Shivers is too feckless a character to carry that weight.
A rollicking satire.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1456376475
Page Count: 352
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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