A wacky Hollywood version of widowhood, rife with Alaskan vixens, antic dating, hardscrabble love, AIDS, make-shift family,...
A romanticized, madcap exploration of familial love and loss.
Tottering between gutting salmon on the Alaskan slime-line and substitute teaching in San Francisco, abruptly widowed and tetherless Bean searches for self-reliance during her 26th year, moving from memories of charismatic husband Mick, the man who would “rescue her,” to the realities of lackluster “life-proof” Bob. Along the way, Bean learns a few tricks from wisecracking sex-pot Lois, plucky gay show-tune loving Jimmy, her own neglected childhood, addict brother Chip, and mute immigrant Martin, until ultimately finding herself content and consoled in the unlikeliest of arms: those of her cranky, kleptomaniac mother-in-law Hanna. Initial momentum moves through the mystery of Mick’s sudden disappearance atop Mt. McKinley and on to the center of the tale, where newcomer Marquis, a New York Times reporter, looks into the questions of what family means and how life’s tragedies define people. Concluding against the backdrop of protracted terminal illness, Marquis’s moral unfurls through antic adventures. When she’d rather watch Friends and eat Ben & Jerry’s, chubby Bean instead feigns retardation in order to bail Hanna out of shoplifting charges, or misses her goodbyes due to an impromptu sex romp at the YMCA. Yet after intervention in the form of a kidnapping illuminates her maternal side, it seems that maybe a husband won’t fix her after all. What Bean really needs is some mothering, and Hanna delivers. Tender sentimentality between the two damaged, resilient women nicely belies the upbeat melodrama’s likable if stereotypical characters and well-paced if cursory plot developments. A bird motif performs heavy foreshadowing, as Audubonesque epigraphs limn each chapter, while Debbie the Duck nursery rhymes, with Hanna standing in as Old Shirley the Titmouse, frequently elucidate Bean’s emotional arc.
A wacky Hollywood version of widowhood, rife with Alaskan vixens, antic dating, hardscrabble love, AIDS, make-shift family, second chances, and jail time.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30630-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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