The last in the trilogy (Loop's Progress, 1986; Experiments with Life and Deaf, 1987) immortalizing the eccentric Loop family of Erie, Pennsylvania, ends disconcertingly with a greeting-card platitude, after much self-conscious literary gamesmanship. Jarvis Loop, still haunted by his dead wife Kara and dark, deep thoughts about death and the meaning of life, is unable to sleep, though he works hard at his garbage-collecting job—a job with obvious wider significance (``...waste will be the only permanent thing we leave, the thoughts of garbagemen will be the poetry of eternity''). Meanwhile, son Visitor calls everyone, including the dog, ``Dad''; mother Helen has turned the dining room into a shrine for her collection of obstreperous saints and the effigy of The Infant of Prague; father Red no longer pulls off doors when he's angry, but he is a brooding presence in the house; and brilliant sister Neda has taken up figure-skating. To add to the confusion, the Cubans may have sent an underwater fleet to attack the city; the Vietnam War is beginning to heat up; and Jarvis must change jobs when the garbage union strikes and he's not rehired. Proceeding in a series of set-pieces—a wacky umpteenth Last Christmas with grandmother Bush; a failed attempt by the Dialecticians, the old neighborhood gang, to hijack a military transport plane carrying Jarvis's brother James to Vietnam; and the trial of long-dead Grandpa Fenster, accused of murder and plagiarism—the novel has an underlying concern with the more profound: the legacy of the dead, the power of love, and, biggest of all, the meaning of life. And these questions are more successfully addressed, and often with surprising tenderness, when Helen is found to have a malignant brain tumor. Like its predecessors, a disconcerting mix of moving insights, overdone zaniness, and obvious conceits, but, here, the strains are showing. The Loops are finally out of it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-87905-478-6
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
