Follows old trails, yet everything you come upon seems absolutely new. A real wonder.
Witt’s first outing, told by a middle sibling, is the story of a North Carolina family, dysfunctional in touching and sometimes very amusing ways.
Morgan-Lee is 15, though she takes us back to earlier years as a way of letting us know who everyone is—and they’re quite a bunch. Her slightly older brother Ginx, for starters, is brilliant but autistic, loved intensely by Morgan-Lee, who both wants his praise and wants to protect him—in spite of his often attacking her with pummels that leave real bruises. Younger Dana is the “normal” one, interested in boys but not in her high-mannered, always-exhausted, neurasthenic and hypercritical mother: in fact, Dana has taken to living mainly at the house of ditzy but welcoming Aunt Lois, who gives cosmetic make-overs and affects knowledge of all things about romance, though her husband, Uncle Pete, is if anything an uncut gem. Morgan-Lee’s bumbling and mild-mannered father completes the roster—that is, until the tall and slim girl from the wrong side of the tracks, with the name of Sweety-Boy, appears one day selling her homemade jellies and jams. Dana’s delight on learning that Sweety-Boy is the sister—well, half-sister—of 16-year-old garage mechanic Jacob leads to a party invitation at Sweety-Boy and Jacob’s place. Things go mighty fast from then on—including the party itself, which may be the most brilliantly described, and outright hilarious, portrait of kids and alcohol ever. The portrait deepens, though, as Morgan-Lee takes upon herself the “protection” of Dana and has her own long night’s encounter with Jacob (another flawless, pitch-perfect section). Serious trouble follows from the jealous—and, yup, incestuous, plus more—Sweety-Boy, who gets vengeance (in just the right amount, though) on Morgan-Lee in a most interesting way before the tale’s perfectly sad and very funny close.
Follows old trails, yet everything you come upon seems absolutely new. A real wonder.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7595-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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
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
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