A classic novel of the West, written with quiet muscle and confidence.
A quietly haunting first novel set in a small ranching town, by the author of Any Small Thing Can Save You (stories: 2001).
Lenna Swanson brings her 14-year-old son Kenny to the unnamed Idaho town after an ugly divorce leaves her penniless. Kenny still adores his father, an Air Force pilot whose visit to take the boy hunting is heartbreaking, as is Kenny’s bittersweet preadolescent loyalty to Lenna. All the kid wants to do is rodeo, but he’s promised he won’t risk riding injuries until his mother’s new job insurance kicks in. Kenny feels lonely, especially after his father dies in a plane crash, and so does Lenna. Soon she finds herself involved with Roddy Moyers, a local rodeo cowboy idolized by Kenny as well as almost everyone else in town. Roddy, who has the kind of easy charisma that lets him get away with anything (too easily for his own good), is also seeing Cynthia Dustin, a senior with musical talent who dreams of escaping her brutal father Earl and has secretly applied for a college scholarship. On Christmas Eve, Cynthia runs into Lenna and Roddy together at the local tavern while Kenny, alone at home, discovers a box of his father’s mementos that sends him over the edge of despair. Roddy leaves town and his messy love life to rejoin the rodeo circuit. Kenny and Cynthia become friends and go to the vacant ranch Roddy’s wealthy parents own so Cynthia can play the baby grand. There, they fall asleep and are discovered; Earl assumes the worst even though nothing untoward has happened. Relationships unravel and re-knit. Cynthia leaves town for good; Roddy and the Swansons remain, facing their future with ambiguous optimism. The strength here lies less in plot details, although the author nimbly handles connections, than in the power of her language and reticent yet fully realized characters.
A classic novel of the West, written with quiet muscle and confidence.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-73500-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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