Reasonably evocative of the self-indulgent ’80s, with some diverting magazine and party scenes, but they’d have to be a lot...
From Witchel (Girls Only, 1997), famed and feared for her acerbic profiles in the New York Times, a surprisingly bland first novel about life on the media fast track in Manhattan.
Sure, there are some good lines about Jolie, the slick women’s magazine where Sandra Berlin holds down a just-above-entry-level job in 1988. “Apparently, pictures of models jumping in the air wearing five-dollar T-shirts and three-thousand-dollar organza skirts were just what the world had been waiting for,” Sandra wisecracks, and her descriptions of Jolie’s editors and her fellow grunts are equally amusing. But they’re also generic, as is almost everything else here, from Sandra’s Jewish suburban background to her WASP fiancé Bucky, who turns out to be simultaneously engaged to two other women, to the inevitable gay friend who confesses halfway through the book that he’s dying of AIDS (a heavily foreshadowed development). Witchel’s description of people’s attitude toward the disease seems awfully naive for the sophisticated circles her heroine moves in. Similarly, although Sandra repeatedly describes herself as smart, she seldom acts that way. Would even the most self-centered workaholic have been taken in by Bucky all these years? Would even the most insecure single girl (Sandra’s 26 but talks as though she’s pushing 40) ever contemplate taking him back? And what except contrived plot complications keeps her apart from Mr. Perfect, art writer Mark Lewis? Yes, we get it: Sandra is intellectually gifted, but dumb about the Things That Really Matter. Witchel has acquired husband Frank Rich’s habit of announcing the blindingly obvious as though she were the first to think of it. “Love, real love, contagious and messy, vanquished all [the rules],” Sandra intones; later, she tells Bucky, “I realized that after the years we spent together I never really knew you.” Duh.
Reasonably evocative of the self-indulgent ’80s, with some diverting magazine and party scenes, but they’d have to be a lot sharper to make up for a tired plot and a heroine who’s not nearly as endearing as her creator thinks.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41179-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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