The novel is without the seething indignation of firsthand chroniclers such as Gordimer, Brink and Coetzee, but it succeeds...
A corrosive tale of life in the waning years of the apartheid regime, when a thousand assumptions are shattered as white privilege declines.
Housewife, mother of three “silver darlings” and eminent cocooner, Janet isn’t entirely oblivious to the world outside, but when a crack appears in her swimming pool, ominously, on Jan. 1, 1976, she tries to contain the damage to her backyard and her interior life. That’s not so easy to do, given that life beyond the gates is clamoring to make itself heard. Even so, when, later, she takes her black gardener to the hardware store to get materials to patch the crack, she’s dimly surprised that he’s ordered to stay outside, as if the country beyond her garden wall is a foreign land. Even her husband, a policeman whose “fingers were the size of fists,” can’t turn back history. Yet Janet keeps trying to shelter herself and her family from a changing South Africa, even as the crack grows more noticeable—and, as it does, becomes ever more a part of her psyche, so that she can feel the gardener’s insistent brush “scrape her very insides like she was the pool and nightmare was about to spring loose.” As Radmann moves his story along, it’s increasingly clear that Janet’s determined myopia is a defense mechanism that helps her escape the bruising injustices of her society, injustices her husband is more than instrumental in delivering. Janet is a haunted, anxiety-ridden soul, and her worries lend Radmann’s book a claustrophobic feeling. Still, despite occasional bouts of staccato overwriting—“It was the need. The need nudged her. As needs must.”—Radmann’s story holds up well. And though the symbol of the cracked swimming pool as metaphor for the disintegration of both a nation and a marriage is perhaps too obvious, Radmann works it judiciously.
The novel is without the seething indignation of firsthand chroniclers such as Gordimer, Brink and Coetzee, but it succeeds in conveying a sense of how life under political evil works—or doesn’t.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78074-399-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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