Artsy ruminations aside, an entertaining, psychologically rich story of a sometimes giddy, sometimes painful awakening.
A frustrated wife tries to get her groove back with the help of a sexy photographer and inspiration from the artist Georgia O’Keeffe in this debut novel.
At the age of 34, with two preschool kids, Elizabeth Crawford finds herself going crazy in a passionless marriage to her husband, Ben, whose lack of desire for her leaves her feeling “unloved and unbeautiful.” She’s also hit a roadblock in her Ph.D. dissertation on 20th-century painter O’Keeffe, struggling to figure out how a sojourn in Hawaii provoked the artist to switch from creating lush flowers to producing pictures of cow skulls in the desert. Assistance on both problems materializes in the form of Richard Ferris, a handsome photographer who turns his smoldering gaze on Elizabeth in their tai chi class. Richard is fascinated by her O’Keeffe theories and proposes a daring way for her to connect more deeply with the painter’s psyche: pose nude for him to re-create a famous series of photographs taken of the artist in the 1920s by her lover, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. During the photo sessions, Elizabeth progresses from severe bashfulness at loosening a few buttons to ebullience as more clothing comes off. She feels “her skin tingling, alert and alive,” while the heightening sexual tension with Richard renders her “dizzy, weak with the desire that flooded her body.” Her walk on the wild side leads to more exposure than she bargained for and eventually forces her to reconsider her attitudes toward Richard, her marriage, O’Keeffe, and herself. The art history musings in Probst’s yearning tale of renewal—“Her core’s still there, her female essence, but it isn’t accessible, not like it is in the flower paintings she did earlier”—often feel murky and uninvolving. Fortunately, the author paints a vivid and absorbing portrait of domestic life—she’s a superb observer of children’s moods and antics—in an unhappy marriage that limps along on deadening routine and sedated feelings. (After a perfunctory coupling with Ben, Elizabeth “knew they’d had sex the same way she knew that the rent was due or that she needed to move a load of laundry from the washer to the dryer.”) Readers will root for Elizabeth—and wince in amusement at her pratfalls—as she strikes out in improbable new directions.
Artsy ruminations aside, an entertaining, psychologically rich story of a sometimes giddy, sometimes painful awakening.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63152-890-3
Page Count: 330
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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