A handful of real moments, presented with bite and wit.
Second story collection from a keen stylist (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, 1998) intent on rewriting the grim fable of modern life.
Fifteen pieces explore the startling and often sadistic relationships among people who love each other, all with a stylistic whiff of Lydia Davis or Rick Moody. “Death Watch,” while first, gives an off-putting indication of the author’s chilly reserve by presenting the premise that “Ten men go to ten doctors” and then filling in the blanks. More typical of this sleek collection is “Off,” about a young woman at a party whose goal is to kiss three men, each with a different color hair. Wearing her slinky silver dress that makes the hostess run for more lipstick and jewelry, the narrator doesn’t bank on the presence of a recent boyfriend at the party, Adam, who recognizes her nutty play for attention and calls her on it. A troubling sadistic streak reveals itself cleanly in “End of the Line,” about a man who goes to the pet store and ends up buying a little man in a cage. The little man has been captured, like a slave, and taken away from his family, and, bit by bit, the large tyrant tortures his pet out of his terrible inability to feel human sympathy. Another sadistic character is the eponymous “Motherfucker” who beds women “of every size and shape in different cities.” He gradually seduces a famous actress in L.A., using her vulnerability to his advantage, then never calls her again, so that in her next movies she grows “luminous in her seriousness” and is finally memorable. Several of the stories deal with the cruelty of the girl adolescent. In “Jinx,” for example, two high-schoolers betray each other over a cute boy, and the narrator in “Debbieland,” once a member of a clique that beat up the vulnerable girl Debbie, lives to rue her action.
A handful of real moments, presented with bite and wit.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50113-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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