Somebody is going to make a terrific movie out of Wide Blue Yonder. It’s a pretty terrific novel.
The unsparing realism displayed in Thompson’s story collections The Gasoline Wars (1979) and Who Do You Love (1999) is blended with a new (and very welcome) warmth and humor in her bighearted third novel: it reads like a journey into Anne Tyler country, with Thomas Berger and John Irving along for the ride.
The opening 50-plus pages comprise a master class in expository technique, as Thompson introduces us to four vividly imagined characters, lays out their interrelationships, and sets them on a collision course that leads inexorably to a (ever so slightly forced) melodramatic climax. Reclusive Harvey Sloan, a.k.a. “Local Forecast,” lives in mentally deranged squalor in a rundown house (in Springfield, Illinois) that’s a shrine to his inexplicable fixation on TV weather programs. His sister-in-law Elaine is an aging divorcée burdened by her demanding “home accessories” business and her rebellious teenager Josie—and also by her ex-husband’s neglect of (his brother) hopeless Uncle Harvey (whose many problems include incipient blindness). Meanwhile, in LA, ethnic misfit Rolando Gottschalk, an unstable petty criminal, begins making his way east, graduating to increasingly dangerous misbehavior. And Josie’s whirlwind affair with a handsome cop hits the skids, sending her to Uncle (actually, he’s her great-uncle) Harvey’s house for sanctuary, just as Harvey is refusing cataract surgery and planning to wed his non-English–speaking cleaning lady Rosa, and Rolando, “armed and crazy” and hallucinating at full throttle, descends on Springfield. The long denouement is fairly contrived. But readers won’t mind, because its characters are so eccentric and engaging they all but leap off the pages. The mother-daughter warfare between Josie and Elaine is blissfully, murderously funny and touching, while Thompson performs little miracles of tact and suggestiveness with both Rolando’s (really scary)dementia and Harvey’s occluded, motley point of view (though the eventual explanation of what drove him crazy is awfully topical and predictable).
Somebody is going to make a terrific movie out of Wide Blue Yonder. It’s a pretty terrific novel.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0512-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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