A worthy addition to a probably underrated oeuvre that looks better and better as the years pass.
An unusual miscellany from the former ace journalist and author of such sophisticated politically based fiction as National Book Award finalist Echo House (1997).
The volume includes a short story and a novella (both previously uncollected), as well as a one-act play written in 1991. The novella “Born in His Time” is a sardonic cautionary tale cast as a piecemeal remembrance of an ardent young Washington “insider” (the eponymous Born) who joins a prestigious law firm as a temporary career move, loses both his ideals and his rather less principled wife (herself an attorney), then burns out and crashes in early middle age—as we learn from the older colleague who concludes gravely “that Born reminded me of an undefended fortress.” It’s quite smoothly written and deftly paced, though flawed by the distance at which the opaque Born is held from the reader, making it difficult to either feel his pain or fully understand his motivations. Better is the story, “Wasps: The Sting as the Kiss”: a fablelike tale of the marriage between an ambitious, risk-taking politician and (the focal character) his cautious wife, whom a perilous childhood allergy has shaped into a woman who keeps her own counsel and resists taking chances. It’s a neat exercise in irony, which turns on the truth of its protagonist’s wry perception that “All things are not possible”—and, incidentally, a clever reworking of one of Just’s finest early stories, “The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert.” The play, Lowell Limpett, portrays a prizewinning veteran journalist’s embittered memories of career and personal life, as he awaits the axe from his (much younger) managing editor. Though its content is predictable, this savvy chamber piece (slightly reminiscent of Eugene O’Neill’s obscure one-acter Hughie) is enlivened by crisp one-liners and surprisingly playable brief epiphanic moments.
A worthy addition to a probably underrated oeuvre that looks better and better as the years pass.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2001
ISBN: 1-58648-087-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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