Slack, thin, with alienating details and characters.
Another tedious road journey across America as a tiresome narrator searches for spiritual nourishment.
A sinking feeling sets in when Katherine, narrator, looks down the American highway and sees “nothing but a nation plunged in darkness” and then defines as an American “one who can achieve the needs of his or her appetite.” Little follows to support or freshen the overworked theme that Murray (Slow Burn, 1990) thus establishes. Flying home from Europe, Katherine filches her seatmate’s copy of Vanity Fair. Her smirking attitude makes a reader wish her fellow passenger would throw a soft drink in face and tell her to get a life. Instead, Katherine heads to New York City, where she hooks up with the equally unappealing Boris Naryshkin, author of “depressing books” like Soulless Man. Katherine spends a great deal of time eating, her hunger stimulated, it appears, from an obsession with cannibalism. Periodically, she segues into excruciatingly detailed descriptions of the Donner Party, the Packer expedition, and the tales of cannibalism behind Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Readers who haven’t already jumped ship will follow Katherine’s rootless life as she heads across America, down to Mexico, then back to the East Coast. But rather than having her look outward at the land—thereby developing her broad thesis—Murray has her obsessively turn inward. Clues gradually emerge that Katherine’s bizarre preoccupations stem from life with a violent mother who once laced with prescription medications the Halloween candy she handed out to her daughter’s friends. Repellant violence attends every step of Katherine’s journey (a coyote eats a truck driver alive), leaving her to wonder whether she’s the victim of an overactive imagination. Few answers follow, as Katherine stands “on the side of the road, alone and deserted.”
Slack, thin, with alienating details and characters.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1769-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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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