Overall: thin, despite good local color.
Evocative scenes of Depression-era Colorado, with a low-wattage plot and unconvincing characters.
Screenwriter and second-novelist Wright (Easy Money, 1995) nicely details life on the plains, where drought and wind have take away the topsoil, and loneliness and hardship are constant for struggling farmers and their wives. Newly married to Alfred Bowen, Virginia was raised as a Quaker and is working for the Quakers when she meets Alfred in Mexico, where he has a job with the YMCA, though already decided to return home and farm: not to the lush family ranch on the well-watered mountain slopes, where his mother and father still live, but to a piece of treeless land to the east. The couple, who’ve met only twice but fall in love through letters, decide to marry, and Virginia comes out to Denver for the ceremony. At 34, she hasn’t expected to marry, and, though she’s deeply in love with Alfred, she has some hurts to bear—she’s been told she can’t have children—and certain secrets that give her shame. Alfred is also troubled by his past. Believing that his father despised him and preferred his elder brother, Samuel, who died in an accident, Alfred refuses to ask him for help, an attitude that nearly ruins him when low prices, drought, and a hard winter threaten ruin. As Virginia tries to adjust to farm life, she recalls her earlier years and regrets that she can’t have a child to end her isolation. Nothing goes well, and life gets even more complicated when Virginia discovers she actually is pregnant. They impulsively ask her brother, Jonathan, a shell-shocked veteran of WWI, to come to help them. Though a whiz with animals, Jonathan is entirely unpredictable and causes nothing but trouble. He forgets his chores and manages to get Ida, a local mentally disabled laundry woman, pregnant, as the farm falls on even harder times. Some unexpected if schematic solutions do appear.
Overall: thin, despite good local color.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3020-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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