Nearing age 60, William B. Dubin, biographer of Twain and Thoreau and (soon) D. H. Lawrence, wonders if he has "given up life to write lives." And one has to wonder if that's what Bernard Malamud is wondering—because this is his least symbolic, most seemingly autobiographical novel, a bleached, gray book that (like so much semi-autobiographical work) is only intermittently affecting despite the restrained allure of Malamud's fiercely polished, gently mocking prose. Like Malamud, Dubin is a Jewish man of letters who married at 31, has two grown children, and lives in Vermont; Dubin's wife Kitty was a widow with a small son when they "married as strangers holding to strange pasts"—he answered her discreet personal ad in The Nation And now they're alone together in often-snowbound Vermont, where rigorous Dubin slaves away at turning a desk covered with index cards into a life of Lawrence. Then, as if by some Lawrentian erotic command, voila!—Fanny Bick, a sometime student and sometime house-cleaner, whose casual sexual invitation Dubin at first rejects, then welcomes in adulterous excursions to Venice (a fiasco of nausea and betrayal as Fanny makes it with a gondolier) and Manhattan. Dubin, "bored with the bounds of marriage," sneaks and lies and revels in Fanny's demanding, inventive appetites (Malamud's conscientiously energetic erotica never quite convinces), but the rest of his life fizzles: he cuckolds, and loses, his only neighbor-friend; adopted son Gerry, an army deserter, has disappeared somewhere in Russia; daughter Maud is an unmarried, pregnant Berkeley Buddhist (though far more appealing than neurotic sex kitten Fanny). Worst of all, level-headed wife Kitty becomes understandably suspicious, especially when Dubin falls impotent, and the resulting kitchen/bedroom exchanges provide some of the most genuinely hurtful marital combat since Strindberg. "He lived in six sheets of glass, shouting soundless pleas for freedom," writes Malamud, and the apparently reconciliatory ending he provides for Dubin doesn't ring true. And neither does the joyful, risky rebirth through Fanny. What does come through is enough pain and aloneness (Dubin trudging through the snow, with no company but D. H. Lawrence) to make this a monumentally sad book brightened only by the inspiring, cheering perfection of Malamud's line-by-line, word-by-word artistry.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1978
ISBN: 0374528829
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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