Malloy (The Year of Ice, 2002) fails to bestow upon his character one bit of self-knowledge, and that’s the most dispiriting...
A lifelong loser finds new ways to screw up in Malloy’s depressing second novel.
Brendan Wolf is a 35-year-old gay man living in Minneapolis. His parents, financial consultants caught bilking their clients, were jailed when Brendan was seven; he then went through several sets of foster parents before being adopted by sadistic psychologists who forced the teenager into brutal “conversion therapy” upon discovering he was gay. Brendan severed all contact with them after dropping out of college. Now, he’s just lost his latest dead-end job and is facing eviction. His favorite book is Into the Wild, the 1996 nonfiction bestseller about Christopher McCandless, the brilliant young loner found dead in the Alaskan wilderness and, in Brendan’s fantasies, his soul- and bedmate. He is pulled in an altogether different direction by big brother Ian, doing time for conning seniors out of their life savings. Ian is due for release, and he and his wife, Cynthia, want Brendan to participate in an elaborate heist, stealing the proceeds from a pro-life group’s Walk for the Unborn. Through a prison contact, Ian also hooks Brendan up with Marv Fletcher, a rich, ugly old queen looking for a “houseboy.” Both scenarios spell disaster, but Brendan, true to form, jumps right in, ingratiating himself with the pro-lifers with a phony story and moving into Marv’s house. The old man has a stroke, but Brendan whisks him out of the nursing home and becomes his incompetent caregiver. This is wholly implausible, as is Marv’s accidental shooting of Brendan. The final absurdity comes when Brendan, still recovering from his wound on the day of the Walk, drives the getaway van without a license.
Malloy (The Year of Ice, 2002) fails to bestow upon his character one bit of self-knowledge, and that’s the most dispiriting thing of all.Pub Date: April 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35976-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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