Predictable southern gothic, but the modulated scrutiny of the Cotton marriage is memorable.
Newcomer Marshall attempts to pull heartstrings while creating suspense in this murder mystery set in rural 1941 Mississippi.
Since Lloyd Cotton’s wife Rowena convinced him to hire Sheila Barnes two years earlier to save the girl from an abusive father, Sheila has proven a hard worker on Lloyd’s dairy farm. Despite being uneducated and, according to Rowena, slow (although the only evidence is unquenchable optimism despite continual mistreatment), she offers spiritual wisdom the supposedly intelligent Cottons take seriously. Waiflike and mildly deformed, she also exudes an animal magnetism that affects every male she encounters. One morning 17-year-old Sheila turns up missing, When her battered, pregnant body is found in a nearby field, the police line up their suspects: Sheila’s demented father, her handsome but dimwitted husband Stoney, and Lloyd himself. Marshall approaches and re-approaches Sheila’s story, Rashomon-style, through five narrators. Lloyd’s 11-year-old daughter Amanda, who considers Sheila her best friend, recounts Sheila’s life at the dairy with an innocence undercut by confused guilt over her own attraction to Stoney and her pubescent need for independence from her doting parents. Genteel Rowena’s version is colored by her difficult, unexpected pregnancy and long-repressed anger over Lloyd’s infidelity years before. When the old affair becomes a public scandal, suspicion lands on Lloyd and rocks his marriage. In his narration, Lloyd acknowledges his inappropriate, unspoken attraction to Sheila and his powerlessness in the face of the scandal. We also hear from Stoney, whose passion for Sheila is both childlike and violent, and from a newspaper reporter who, while unraveling the case, finds himself attracted to the wife of Stoney’s older, handsomer, and more vicious brother. Sheila remains a victim cliché despite (or because of) Marshall’s attempt to make her a symbol of desecrated innocence. No one will be shocked to learn who impregnated or killed her.
Predictable southern gothic, but the modulated scrutiny of the Cotton marriage is memorable.Pub Date: April 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-931561-05-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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