A New York City novel par excellence.
Something’s not right in the Big Apple.
After an extended trip home (the south side of Chicago) to deal with the death of his mother, funk clarinetist Ike Morphy returns to find his apartment in the Roberto Clemente Condominium Building on Ellington Boulevard for sale. The problem is that Ike had a lease—sort of. It turns out that many years before he had made a handshake deal with the owner, Jerry Masler, but now Jerry’s son, Mark, can’t resist the boom in real-estate prices, so he tells Ike that unless he can come up with $650,000 he can count on kissing his $350 monthly rent payment goodbye. The dysfunctional couple interested in purchasing the condo consists of Rebecca Sugarman, a peripatetic English grad student but now a staffer on the American Standard, a venerable but dying magazine of short stories, essays and reviews, and her husband Darrell Schiff, a teaching assistant emeritus desultorily trying to finish his dissertation at Columbia. Each chapter of Langer’s latest (The Washington Story, 2005, etc.) changes focus from one character (or cluster of characters) to another. We learn of Mark’s pride in his two blisteringly brief marriages and his current courting of a much younger woman; of Jane Earhart (née Gigi Malinowski), whose juvenilia are turned into a bestselling novel and who creates a book for a musical entitled Ellington Boulevard; of Josh Dybnick, who pushes real estate but is really interested in theater; and of Herbie Mann, Ike’s pooch, rescued from the pound and prone to overhear human conversations. Like life in New York, it’s all a bit unreal—Rebecca falls in love with Ike, Darrell falls in love with Jane, and the apartment, let us say, reverts to its rightful owner(s).
A New York City novel par excellence.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52205-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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