The latest volume in Murray's sweet and smooth roman Ö fleuve (Trainwhistle Guitar, 1976; The Spyglass Tree, 1991) takes his boy Scooter into early manhood and up from the South; it's a self- consciously heroic tale of a charmed life, patterned on the ``vamps, choruses, riffs, call and response patterns, breaks, chases, and so on'' of jazz. One needn't rely on Murray's convenient gloss—the simultaneously published The Blue Devils of Nada (see p. TKTK)—to appreciate the rhythms and structures of Scooter's story. Just out of college in the 1920s, bass-playing Scooter (renamed Schoolboy) is invited by the Bossman himself (modelled on Duke Ellington) to join the best roadband in the country. He begins crisscrossing the US not only covering the great historic trails, but also grooving on the ever-expanding world of American culture. In the band are men whose nicknames indicate their characters and resonate with the fullness of domestic life and world myth. Murray's Whitmanesque troop includes Old Pro, a walking embodiment of the canon of musical history, technique, and lore; Osceola Menefee, the all- American mutt from Okefenokee; Malachi Moberly, who could have had a career in baseball; and Mucho Moola, a rich kid from Chicago, trained on the violin but hooked on the trumpet. The Bossman introduces Schoolboy to Daddy Royal, a Harlem king who retired from dancing and who warns about settling for a hustle over hard work and class. Schoolboy, still planning on accumulating enough cushion to go to grad school in the humanities, nevertheless attends to the wisdom of his elders. The Bossman even sets him up, on the sly, with a Scheherazade, Gaynelle Whitlow, who hips him to the truth about Hollywood after Schoolboy's extended personal appearance in the bedroom of Jewel Templeton, a beautiful movie star with a thirst for knowledge as voracious as his own. Murray's quest narrative finds Schoolboy heading back home after all this sophisticated yawping. One only hopes this Proustian stomp ain't over yet.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-43986-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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