A big-thinking but overstuffed postmodern epic.
Secret family histories drive this hefty novel encompassing rock music, the art world, leftist politics, the long reach of the Holocaust, and more.
The second novel by Bauman (And the Word Was, 2006) turns on three figures with complex pasts. Moses Teumer, a history professor, is seeking a bone-marrow donor to treat his leukemia when he discovers he’s the half brother of Alchemy Savant, a Bono-esque rock star with messianic political ambitions; their shared mother is Salome Savant, a celebrated counterculture artist with a history of mental breakdowns. The Pynchon-esque character names provide a hint about the sensibility of the novel, which is rife with clandestine relationships and glimpses into the loopy but earnest LA demimonde of sex, music, and limousine liberals. Under those glitzy surfaces of money and art, Bauman argues, blood connections are more truly influential: Moses must reckon with his discovery that his father is an unrepentant Nazi soldier, while Salome shares the same urge for attention and seclusion that defined her mother, Greta Garbo. At more than 600 pages, the novel is too baggy to sustain its lead characters without contrivance; the closing sections, which move into the near future to describe Alchemy’s climb to the political stage, are a speedy but wearying recycling of riffs on media culture, family drama, and American surveillance politics that were already established early on. And the story’s tragic climax is less powerful for being revealed early. Bauman does have the virtue of writing well in multiple registers. Salome’s perspective is free-wheeling and dreamlike, Moses’ sagely, and Alchemy is seen largely via tough-talking band mate Ambitious Mindswallow, who rises from a Queens street kid to member of the world’s biggest band. He’s a key allegorical figure in Bauman’s lament for a lost American dream where once upon a time anything was possible.
A big-thinking but overstuffed postmodern epic.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-448-1
Page Count: 474
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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