A first novel set in New York that tries too hard to be outrageous as it skewers relations between the sexes in pretentious prose. Mixing haiku, verbal riffs with narrative and commentary divided into paragraphs rather than chapters, New Yorker Sima recalls an October of 40ish Jane Samuels, for whom ``Fall is the winter'' of her life, ``a catch-up season.'' Each October, Jane stops working and takes stock, but in the October of the novel, on the fourth anniversary of her ``monumentally one-sided divorce,'' she is hit on the forehead by an enormous rabbit; the only witness is a rather rabbity-looking crossing guard. The search for Jane's bunny-assailant becomes a hallucinatory trip, not down the rabbit- hole like Alice, but around a New York which is as lunatic as Carroll's Wonderland. As the month passes, Jane frequently checks out the hardware store where ex-husband Harold and his new and expectant wife can be found. She visits with her ``longevity friend Susan,'' who not only has an ``intense relationship'' with her dog, Patches, but believes in replacing, like ``eyeglass frames,'' negative frames of mind with positive ones. She tries to improve her parents' sex lives (her mother is making love to the medieval bestiary that emerges from her apartment walls, and her father has something going with the drains). She continues her affair with ``the Fling,'' Nate, the married psychiatrist to whose wife she also gives sex lessons; makes frequent love to the extraordinary nose of Gerald, as well as to men who appear out of the wall; is harassed by a libidinous elevator; and, most ordinarily of all, shops for a new bathing suit and eats lots of ice cream. The rabbit is found, dealt with, and October finally draws to a close as, mercifully, does Jane's Bad Hare Day. Some acute insights, but the relentless raunchiness dressed up in wannabe experimental drag ends up giving both sex and the avant garde a bad name.
Pub Date: April 16, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-072-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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