Chepaitis (Feeding Christine, 2000) is a polished writer, but her second effort comes up short.
A story about the challenge of surviving grief begins well, but falters toward end.
Cricket Thompson, not quite 40 and not quite happy, lives the unexamined life in upstate New York with her two teenaged daughters and dependable husband. On the weekends she volunteers at a bird sanctuary run by town eccentric Pass Christian, planning the gardens and building a butterfly house. Then one day a madman steps into the local mall and begins shooting people, including Cricket's 13-year-old daughter Grace. Seriously injured, Grace lies comatose in a hospital bed with Cricket by her side—for days, weeks, then months. Believing that at any moment her child will wake up, she all but withdraws from the world and rarely returns home, virtually ignoring the adulterous solace her husband is taking with her own sister and the effect of the tragedy on older daughter Janis. When Grace dies, Cricket becomes delusional. At this point, the novel slips into familiar terrain. The first half, which quietly explores monotony and then details the slow unraveling of Cricket's life, provides a generous and sympathetic account of a mundane existence that is nonetheless so much better than the alternative on offer. But after Grace's death, Cricket embarks on a predictable middle-aged search for identity. She finds comfort with birdman Pass, and the two take his mentally handicapped brother Law with them on a trip to New Orleans to look at butterflies. When Cricket discovers Law may have been involved in the mall shootings, she drives away in a futile attempt to escape sorrow. Her subsequent wanderings in New Mexico (is she mad? hallucinating? really enjoying her new life as a waitress?) lack the poignancy of the opening chapters and rely too often on quasi-spiritual coincidences to bring about Cricket's recovery of self.
Chepaitis (Feeding Christine, 2000) is a polished writer, but her second effort comes up short.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3750-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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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