Slow and pretentious if occasionally affecting.
The former editor of Big Sky Journal, not surprisingly, trudges in the sensitive/macho tradition of Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy in his first novel, a love story set in Wyoming during the 1920s.
Still devastated by her beloved father’s death the previous year, 17-year-old New Yorker Virginia Price is a mix of spoiled schoolgirl innocence and flapper sophistication. Her mother is a socialite whose relationship with her daughter is unbelievably cold-hearted. After Virginia is date-raped by her older, highly respectable boyfriend Charlie, her mother blames Virginia, choosing not to believe anything bad about the young man. When it becomes clear that Virginia is pregnant, she’s sent with an elderly aunt as her only companion to hide out at a Wyoming ranch until the baby is born. There, she encounters Henry Mohr, the ranch owner’s stepson, who is still traumatized by his military experience in WWI and filled with angry guilt over his inability to protect his half-Indian mother Rose from the physical abuse her husband Frank periodically inflicts on her. In contrast to chubby, wimpy, yet vicious Charlie, Henry is ruggedly sensitive, a man who “loves hunting but could do without the killing.” The attraction between Virginia and Henry is (surprise) immediate. Charlie’s arrival at the farm to make amends by marrying Virginia only intensifies her affair with the other. She has little to say to the suddenly caring and patient Charlie, who may or may not be aware that Virginia and Henry spend their nights together in his bunkhouse. As Virginia’s pregnancy progresses and winter sets in, emotions flare, sending all into crisis. Readers more or less know the outcome early on, since Jones intersperses his narrative with italicized glances back from the now elderly Virginia. And since her love affair has been both with man and place, Jones also devotes many long passages to lovingly detailed descriptions of ranch work and cowboy life.
Slow and pretentious if occasionally affecting.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-13161-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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