Beach reading with brains and bite from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of manners Lurie (Foreign Affairs, 1984; Women and Ghosts, 1994, etc.). For 25 years, Jenny Walker has been a contented helpmeet to her famous husband Wilkie. She has done the research, typed drafts, and corrected the grammar for the nature books that have made his reputation, and she’s dealt with the mundane details of everyday life she considers him too important to bother with. Now, at 46, she finds her 71-year-old spouse distracted, remote, uninterested even in his work in progress. Wilkie, we learn, thinks he has cancer and considers himself a has-been: What will his helpless wife do when he’s gone? Before that’s a problem, Jenny, with her customary tact, suggests a sojourn in Key West, presenting it as a way for her to get away from the New England winter rather than as a respite for Wilkie. In the steamy, unfettered atmosphere of America’s last resort, she makes friends with a crew of free spirits—most notably HIV-positive gardener Jacko and lesbian proprietor of a women-only guesthouse Lee—while Wilkie’s plots his suicide and is stymied in three mordantly comic episodes. The plot thickens with Jenny’s increasingly warm feelings for Lee and with the arrivals of Jacko’s downtrodden cousin Barbie and her overbearing, right-wing Republican mother Myra. As usual, Lurie observes with precision and humor everything from the economics of retirement homes to trendy restaurants and waiters who announce themselves by name. Her characters stumble toward new beginnings with appealingly human hesitancy: Even the elderly widowed artist who voices Lurie’s most autumnal musings seems poised for renewal in the good-natured finale. The dreadful Myra finally asserts her own political ambitions and temporarily ceases trying to manage everyone else’s lives; and Jenny draws strength from her love for Lee to nourish her ongoing but evolving commitment to Wilkie. No great revelations, but a strong story from a sharp observer of the American social scene. (First printing of 35,000; author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5866-4
Page Count: 321
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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