Harmless fun, with some good thwacks at America’s idiotic health system.
A pair of loving but ill-prepared brothers take on the minions of the presidential machinery who have medical designs on a heart intended for the lads’ mum.
Fitzhugh (Fender Benders, 2001, etc.) slathers on the satire, sparing no excess in a sendup of medical/hospital/HMO and presidential evil doings featuring an ever growing cast of ever wilder characters blundering from LA to Salt Lake City as they dodge pursuers from warring Washington factions. Sweet 60-ish Rose Tailor is at the center of this pleasant nonsense about hearts and powers. Rose’s ticker is down to its last few beats when word comes that she’s finally at the top of the list of transplant patients. She’s had to wait unusually long because of her AB negative blood type, a type shared by America’s current president, whose dastardly chief of staff Martin Brooks believes the country would be better off not knowing that the Chief Executive isn’t really sturdy enough for the approaching election. So, just as West Coast transplant trainee Dr. Debbie Robbins is scrubbing up to pop a nice new heart into Rose, an FBI agent dispatched by Brooks informs her that there’s a higher place for it. But Washington hasn’t reckoned on Rose’s sons Spence and Boyd, bleeding-heart lawyer and chickenhearted banker respectively, who snatch organ and surgeon, scoop up their sedated mum, shanghai a closeted gay California Highway Patrolman, and cram them all into a 1965 Mustang, starting a trek for a new transplant venue. They’re pursued not only by the president’s goons but by Men in Black sent by the president’s comely rival, who thinks it might advance her cause if that heart didn’t make it into the executive thorax. Guided by desperation, ringleader Spence and reluctant brother Boyd head eastward in increasingly bizarre vehicles until they come to a Major Mormon Hospital, arriving in a Mormon school bus populated by nearly everyone they’ve met on the way.
Harmless fun, with some good thwacks at America’s idiotic health system.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-380-97758-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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