Lovely, original writing on the unlikely romance between prisoners and poetry.
An elegant piece featuring a psychic descendant of Mark Twain.
Muske-Dukes draws on her own experience with the penal system (she founded a creative writing program—the very first for prisoners—on Riker’s Island) to fashion a novel rich in both ideas and prose. Holly Mattox is a young Midwesterner in New York, secretly married to K.B. (marriage seems so embarrassingly establishment in the early ’70s), and trying to prove herself as a poet, a teacher and a thoroughly independent woman. She has a mentor of sorts in Sam Glass, a young editor with connections to all that’s literary in the city (the identity of real writers are thinly, amusingly veiled) and quite a bit beyond. He invites her to important events, tries seducing her and gets her a job lecturing smug grad students at Columbia. But that world is a far cry from her volunteer work—teaching a poetry workshop at the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island. Most of the women are in for prostitution, but a few are there on murder charges, including Akilah Malik, a notorious radical charged with killing a cop. And then there’s Polly Lyle Clement, seemingly charged with nothing more than mistakenly landing her raft on the island. They all produce fairly heartbreaking poetry—what you would expect from the defeated lives they describe, except for Polly, who claims to be the descendant of Mark Twain and is channeling his spirit in class. Polly indeed has a way with words and half convinces everyone that something vaguely supernatural is going on, as she seems to see the “truth” of everyone’s crimes. Holly becomes emotionally involved with the women, and when Akilah breaks out of prison, it becomes Holly’s mission to save Polly, now slowly dying in solitary, and suspected of arranging Akilah’s escape. Though well-plotted, Muske-Dukes triumph lies in building a discourse on the nature of language, of poetry, of its small successes and inevitable limitations in the midst of ruinous lives.
Lovely, original writing on the unlikely romance between prisoners and poetry.Pub Date: July 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-50927-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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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