An empathetic glimpse into the lives of characters who could really use a win.
At a West Texas auto dealership, competitors vie for a brand-new pickup truck in a contest to see who can keep his or her hands on the prize for the longest time.
The inspiration here is S.R. Bindler’s 1998 documentary Hands on a Hard Body, about a car dealership which ran a similar competition. The rules are straightforward: contestants must keep at least one hand on the truck at all times except during occasional designated break periods. Whoever makes it longest wins. When readers catch up with Mojtabai’s (Autumn, 2015, etc.) fictional participants, they’re in the 65th hour of the contest, and only seven remain. Among those still woozily standing are Bev, a former addict whose Christianity has literally, it seems, saved her; Gib, who wanted to be a Marine but was turned down for giving “one or two ‘smart-ass answers’ "; and Dan and Josh, fraternal twins who resent each other so ferociously that one has changed his surname to differentiate himself from the other. Also on hand is a journalist, aptly named Trew Reade, who gives readers context but also has an intriguing back story of his own. (Written in the third person, the short chapters rotate between characters’ perspectives). Mojtabai’s challenge is to keep the narrative moving despite the fact that, for much of the novel, little happens (to the point that two of the chapters are subtitled “Nothing is Happening”). More often than not she succeeds, in part by focusing on the characters’ acute economic anxiety (one woman’s recollection of the expenses associated with her daughter’s American Spirit doll is especially well-done). Indeed, the story here is less the contest itself than what has led the contestants to compete in the first place.
An empathetic glimpse into the lives of characters who could really use a win.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3417-1
Page Count: 120
Publisher: TriQuarterly/Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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