As the provocative novelist probably intended, reading this book is hell.
Through 11 previous novels (Tell-All, 2010, etc.), the author who first achieved notoriety through the movie adaptation of his Fight Club debut (1996) has continued to mix edgy humor with sharp social commentary while flirting with taboo. Yet his latest isn’t particularly funny, insightful or powerful. Its narrator is 13-year-old Madison—who tries her best to keep secret her full name: Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer. She has the voice of a typical teenage girl, one who is precocious and a little overweight. But she is dead. And her parents are obviously patterned on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt (actually more the former than the latter), whose relentless self-promotion includes a series of high-profile adoptions, and who do their best to keep their daughter stuck in time, well short of puberty. Or did, because now that Madison is dead, she is beyond their reach—in hell. The author’s creative imagination in conjuring the realm of eternal damnation falls considerably short of Dante’s. Telemarketing comes from hell. So does porn. It has rivers and lakes of bodily secretions. It spawned TV and the Internet. It is remarkably easy to become consigned there, making the reader wonder what might possibly be required to gain entry into heaven. Madison is there because of a fatal marijuana overdose, or at least that’s what she says at the start. Almost all lawyers, journalists and celebrities are there. It is not a metaphor for life on earth: “What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven. Earth is Earth. Dead is dead,” writes Madison. Each of the 38 short chapters begins, with a nod toward Judy Blume: “Are you there, Satan? It’s me, Madison.” The novel sustains a consistency of narrative voice, but there is little plot or momentum, until it climaxes at the end with a power play, identity transformation and O. Henry–ish twist, followed by the most frightening of all possible promises: “To be continued…”
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53302-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
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
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