Plodding, dull, and unappealing: a bad start.
A first novel, loosely based on actual events from the late 1980s, describing the confusions and travails of a young Italian-American from Brooklyn implicated in the murder of a black man.
Bensonhurst in 1989 (i.e., the pre-Giuliani era) was trying hard to remain what it had always been: a quiet backwater of Brooklyn, of little interest to anyone who did not already live there. Tony Santangelo, born and raised in Bensonhurst, was a true neighborhood boy with all the proper loyalties, but he succeeded nevertheless in nearly destroying the place by bringing in the one thing his neighbors could not tolerate: publicity. Tony took part in the fatal beating of a young black, an act so apparently wanton and unprovoked that it attracted international attention and set off a veritable invasion of protest marches and rallies. After serving five years in jail for the crime, Tony came back to Brooklyn and took a job as a security clerk. His story seesaws back and forth in time for ten years, beginning in 1989, but the fulcrum of the tale is the night of the slaying, even if the narration is episodic and somewhat rambling. We learn that Tony once had a black girlfriend, we are treated to descriptions of backseat orgies and depraved bachelor parties, and we find casual references to the neighborhood wiseguys who are part of the local terrain. Tony’s grandmother Vera likes to cook and spends a lot of time in church. Tony’s grandfather Val is a Giants fan. Tony’s father Gino isn’t around very much. A suspicious-looking black man with a tattoo on his neck seems to be stalking Tony after his release from prison. What does it all add up to? Well might one ask, especially as the whole undertaking is narrated in the sort of workshop prose (“Cars passed on the highway above: the rhythm of tires rolling over grids in the road; for a brief moment, through an open car window, music”) that seems intent on making as few points as possible.
Plodding, dull, and unappealing: a bad start.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-893956-21-0
Page Count: 226
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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