Amusing riffs, sharp wit, and the search for a ’70s icon aren’t enough to keep the action moving. Sadly, Christine’s lull is...
A Hollywood screenwriter follows her insider debut novel (The Cigarette Girl, 1999) with another girl-on-the-make story. This time the girl is 35 and what she’s trying to make is a documentary film.
Christine Chase is in a self-described lull. It’s the year leading up to the millennium and her career’s going nowhere, her six-year marriage to party animal, wandering-eye, gorgeous James is over, and her $50 visits to the Centerfold newsstand on Melrose and Fairfax for magazines and newspapers are the highlight of her week. She’s got a mild relationship with the clerk, William, irreverently dubbed “magazine guy,” but, ironically, it’s here with William that the quest for a new life takes shape. The keyword is Richard Gault, a ’70s rocker who made a small splash before disappearing into the void. And, well, this is a novel about celebrity. “I was obsessed with how obsessed people can get with celebrities,” Christine tells us, and her clever insights are on autopilot as she documents the fringe characters of Hollywood and their habits. There are the Hint-and-Deny girls who give you every clue about who they’re sleeping with, then insist you’re wrong when you guess right; the “def con four system,” involving namedropping in a complicated pattern; and the PDP thing—Public Display of Privacy. Christine collects a group of fellow seekers—William; a cameraman named Waz; Jennifer, an H-and-D girl whose body warrants third looks—and they set off to find Richard Gault, who slowly becomes so much larger than life that Christine refers to him as God. (Anybody remember John Galt in Atlas Shrugged?) Along the way, Christine finds time to feed her libido, muse endlessly on the LA scene, actually find Richard Gault—and the answer to her prayers.
Amusing riffs, sharp wit, and the search for a ’70s icon aren’t enough to keep the action moving. Sadly, Christine’s lull is far-reaching.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-214-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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