Like a friend complaining about her love life, this novel, while resonant, is ultimately pretty boring.
A couple separates for the summer to ponder their relationship, among other things.
Ellen and Adam are at a crossroads. Though they have been dating for years, they are just coming to understand their fairly sizable differences. Ellen, the product of an urbane, upper-crust upbringing, is pretty, practical and bored. Adam, solidly middle class, has no desire to ever own a suit or attend a function that would require him to do so. He is inspired by obscure philosophy, intellectual banter and, above all, nature. Ellen halfheartedly follows Adam to Toronto, where he is enrolled in a nebulous Master’s program, and gets a job in an art gallery to pass the time while she dreams of an engagement ring. Meanwhile, Adam becomes close to Cara, a brash, brilliant lesbian he meets at school. When summer comes, Adam embarks on a solo 50-day paddling trip in the northern wilderness, leaving Ellen to fend for herself in the stiflingly hot city she has come to resent. It is a challenge for both—and one that will either save or end their teetering relationship. At first, Ellen is in denial, fantasizing that Adam will return ready to make a real commitment, but she finds herself swept up in a bustling social circle championed by an intriguing new coworker, Deborah, who is still haunted by a baby that she gave up for adoption years ago. Simultaneously, Adam, in the wilderness, fantasizes about a woman who would understand his relationship with nature, and tries to deal with his feelings for the two real women he has left behind—Ellen and Cara. Pick is adept at chronicling the details of a relationship in a believable way. But that’s also her problem: We all have enough Adams and Ellens in our own lives without turning to fiction.
Like a friend complaining about her love life, this novel, while resonant, is ultimately pretty boring.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55192-783-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Raincoast
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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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