Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys, 2007, etc.) bounces readers from one subnarrative to another, and his attempt to wring a...
The lives of pimps, hustlers and other “deviant” denizens crisscross and eventually intersect on the mean streets of Washington, D.C.
Jonathan Seede, reporter for the Washington Herald, wakes up one morning to find his wife and infant son have fled, perhaps because for him fatherhood has never been a high priority. To a friend he rants about his wife’s expectations that he be supportive: “ What about my needs, you know what I’m saying?...There’s no me anymore. I have ceased to exist in my own house.” Seede tries to find meaning by getting down and dirty in the drug culture of D.C. His work on a freelance piece brings him in contact with the inhabitants of the Fourteenth Street Strip. These include the Pope of Pot, who is as intellectually brilliant as he is socially maladapted (he passes out joints to those waiting in line to tour the White House); prostitutes with names like China Doll, Razor Sally and Titty Bitty; a gay social activist; a gorgeous teenage runaway (a “Korean-Lithuanian-African-American-French-Native Indian Jew with no mother”); an eccentric billionaire preoccupied with philosophical answers only a Mayan crystal skull can provide; and a cop who, refreshingly, is not cynical. Seede eventually gets rather too close to his work and begins freebasing cocaine, so you might say that his objectivity as a reporter becomes compromised. Just when he’s strung out to the max, his wife and kid reappear, and he tries to justify his behavior by claiming how “prohibition and sublimation are detrimental to a healthy life. How, if you don’t satisfy your needs…you end up with big problems.”
Sager (Revenge of the Donut Boys, 2007, etc.) bounces readers from one subnarrative to another, and his attempt to wring a happy ending from these materials ultimately strikes a false note.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7048-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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