Well-crafted, warmly treated—and unforgivably meek.
A widow repairs an old car in order to mend her broken life.
Alison, the heart of Barkley’s second novel (after Money, Love, 2000), has been without her husband for some two years now. Since he died, she’s been living with her quick-to-criticize sister Sarah and studiously avoiding anything like a life in her small West Virginia town. Once a teacher at the local college, she hasn’t wanted anything to do with that part of her past for quite some time. At the outset, she’s decided to take on a project: restoring the rust-eaten 1976 Corvette that’s wearing grooves in the floor of her husband’s garage. A child of the suburbs (her husband took care of all things mechanical), Alison has no skills or training for the job—just time and determination. So she gets a repair manual, starts maxing out her credit cards at the auto-parts store (run by a friendly preacher who likes to include hellfire-and-brimstone pamphlets with all purchases), and getting to work. The subplot involves Alison’s friendship with Gordon Kesler, an old man who plays records for the dance lessons that Sarah runs out of her house. Gordon, a trivia buff and great teller of lies, introduces Alison to his son, Max, who works in demolitions, blowing up old silos and the like. Alison starts up a fitful romance with Max, a surprisingly sensitive and articulate guy for someone who spends his time playing around with dynamite. An unfortunate branch of the subplot follows the draining of the lake near the town, which everyone thinks will uncover the car that, legend has it, Gordon drove across the ice years ago and that fell through, almost taking him with it. The water is drained, truth uncovered, etc. Because it’s just that kind of book, Alison’s car repair takes on über-symbolic significance as, through it, she learns how to live again.
Well-crafted, warmly treated—and unforgivably meek.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-29138-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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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