Not enjoyable, even a little distasteful.
A descendent of John D. Rockefeller, Norton debuts with a coming-of-age novel about another poor little rich girl who suffers neglect and abuse at the hands of her villainous mother.
In 1978 Chicago, 10-year-old Bettina lives in fear and fascination of her mother: Babs Ballentyne, heiress to the Ballentyne chocolate fortune, is an unfortunate cross between Auntie Mame and Mommy Dearest, spoiled, egotistical and despotic. Although Bettina describes her as a blond beauty in the Grace Kelly mold, Babs is unrelentingly crass and hates anything that smacks of intellect or emotion. Whether she loves her daughter is unclear, but bookish, sensitive Bettina irritates the controlling Babs to no end. When Babs discovers a forbidden can of ginger ale in Bettina’s room, she goes berserk and destroys Bettina’s most prized possession. What Babs loves, besides profanity and cigarettes, is sex; and she describes to Bettina in prurient detail the sex she’s enjoying with her married boyfriend, Mack. Over the next couple of years as the relationship waxes and wanes, Mack becomes the one semidependable adult in Bettina’s life, not counting a stereotypical black cook. But shortly after returning to his wife, Mack dies in a drunken car accident. Cut to 1983. Bettina arrives at prep school in New Hampshire alone with one suitcase and a lot of travelers’ checks. She’s not very interested in her genuinely nice roommate (Bettina’s condescending attitudes toward anyone middle class, not to mention her tone of low-key anti-Semitism, may be inherited but limit a reader’s sympathy). Meredith, the preppy mean girl down the hall, becomes Bettina’s obsession, whom she wants to impress and defeat, especially when she realizes Meredith’s on-again-off-again boyfriend is Mack’s son. Soon Bettina is navigating her sexual awakening with side roads into sadomasochism. Babs disappears from the story for a while but shows up in time to ruin a little more of Bettina’s life before her final exit. Bettina ends her flat-footed narration not on a note of growth or self-awareness, but one of enduring blame.
Not enjoyable, even a little distasteful.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-84004-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
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
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