Thoughtful but full of action—and a pleasing entertainment, too.
Things are never as they seem: not among the well-heeled of Manhattan and certainly not among the leave-me-alone downtrodden of rural Michigan.
Sandy Mulligan, a writer with a nagging Greek chorus of an agent always over his shoulder, has bailed from New York, marriage, the old life. One is tempted to read something of author Sorrentino (The Trance, 2005, etc.) into Sandy, long absent as he’s been from the scene, though Sandy takes things a step further, hiding himself away in a little Midwestern town near an Indian reservation and its obligatory casino. His agent protests, naturally (“They don’t have what you need to be human out there,” he moans), but Sandy is bent on what he deems “exile and cunning” all the same. Others have the same idea. In that little town, an Ojibway storyteller proves a fascinating diversion— but is he who he says he is? Why does a sexy investigative reporter make a practice of eluding ethnic definition, resisting being called Native, Hispanic, Filipina, or whatever other census category people try to pin her to? Why do all the principal employees of the casino have Italian names, and what the heck is a “transfer pricing manager”? In this welter, it’s clear that Sandy will never find time or peace to knuckle down to his overdue novel, but he’ll also rack up plenty of new stories to tell—many of them of an erotic bent. In the end, Sorrentino’s smartly conceived story is something of a thriller, though more Richard Russo than Robert Ludlum; it’s about ruses and masks and our desire to be something other than our imperfectible selves. There’s also plenty of subtext on the literary life, with publishers increasingly seeing books as inconvenient commodities and a culture constantly in search of some new zeitgeist definer—who almost certainly won’t be Sandy. “They won’t even be remembering your work,” his agent thunders. “They’ll be remembering fucking Ethan Hawke.” A fate worse than oblivion, that.
Thoughtful but full of action—and a pleasing entertainment, too.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9574-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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