The story sometimes strays into descriptions of architectural styles, which may not be of interest to every reader, but this...
A fresh start in a new city should signify a positive beginning for a couple and their 10-month-old son, but they soon discover that, though their old possessions disappear when their Jeep Cherokee is stolen, their emotional baggage remains.
Lynn (Now You See It, 2004) explores the thoughts and actions of Nate and Emily, life partners who have been together since the two met at the baggage claim at JFK airport and shared a taxi into New York City. Now parents and no longer able to afford the cost of living in an expensive apartment, the two pack up their Jeep Cherokee and head for a job offer in Newport, R.I. It’s Friday afternoon before Columbus Day weekend, and the couple sign the paperwork for their new house, receive the keys and head back to their vehicle, ready to spend the next few nights camping out on air mattresses in their new home. But the Jeep, and everything in it, is gone. Left with limited cash and burdened by secrets, the couple faces the long weekend emotionally distanced and guilt-ridden. Nate, the son of a famous architect who was absent for much of his life, reflects upon his childhood, his one brief glimpse of his grandfather, his closeness to his younger brother and his mother’s death as he dredges up fears that he’s inherited a genetic disease that could cripple not only his life, but that of his son. Emily’s worried about an incident that occurred before she left NYC, the changes in herself that she has trouble reconciling and how her actions will affect her family’s future. Lynn’s narrative, which depicts the raw emotional impact of deceit and the helplessness of being unable to foretell the future or forestall the inevitable, contains moments that introduce wit and humor to a bleak situation that becomes bleaker by the moment.
The story sometimes strays into descriptions of architectural styles, which may not be of interest to every reader, but this only minimally detracts from the author’s distinctive characters and focus.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-10210-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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