Nearing age 60, William B. Dubin, biographer of Twain and Thoreau and (soon) D. H. Lawrence, wonders if he has "given up life to write lives." And one has to wonder if that's what Bernard Malamud is wondering—because this is his least symbolic, most seemingly autobiographical novel, a bleached, gray book that (like so much semi-autobiographical work) is only intermittently affecting despite the restrained allure of Malamud's fiercely polished, gently mocking prose. Like Malamud, Dubin is a Jewish man of letters who married at 31, has two grown children, and lives in Vermont; Dubin's wife Kitty was a widow with a small son when they "married as strangers holding to strange pasts"—he answered her discreet personal ad in The Nation And now they're alone together in often-snowbound Vermont, where rigorous Dubin slaves away at turning a desk covered with index cards into a life of Lawrence. Then, as if by some Lawrentian erotic command, voila!—Fanny Bick, a sometime student and sometime house-cleaner, whose casual sexual invitation Dubin at first rejects, then welcomes in adulterous excursions to Venice (a fiasco of nausea and betrayal as Fanny makes it with a gondolier) and Manhattan. Dubin, "bored with the bounds of marriage," sneaks and lies and revels in Fanny's demanding, inventive appetites (Malamud's conscientiously energetic erotica never quite convinces), but the rest of his life fizzles: he cuckolds, and loses, his only neighbor-friend; adopted son Gerry, an army deserter, has disappeared somewhere in Russia; daughter Maud is an unmarried, pregnant Berkeley Buddhist (though far more appealing than neurotic sex kitten Fanny). Worst of all, level-headed wife Kitty becomes understandably suspicious, especially when Dubin falls impotent, and the resulting kitchen/bedroom exchanges provide some of the most genuinely hurtful marital combat since Strindberg. "He lived in six sheets of glass, shouting soundless pleas for freedom," writes Malamud, and the apparently reconciliatory ending he provides for Dubin doesn't ring true. And neither does the joyful, risky rebirth through Fanny. What does come through is enough pain and aloneness (Dubin trudging through the snow, with no company but D. H. Lawrence) to make this a monumentally sad book brightened only by the inspiring, cheering perfection of Malamud's line-by-line, word-by-word artistry.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1978
ISBN: 0374528829
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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