Davis's skill brings wintry Montana alive—predictably bleak, unexpectedly vibrant—and if her characters inch over the top at...
Nothing—not the people, not the land, not the winter—is merely life-size in this brilliant, and beautifully written, debut novel from storywriter and Pushcart-winner Davis.
After four years of better-than-average sheriffing, Ike Parsons is still regarded as a stranger in the tough little Montana town that employs him. Sure, he can name all the people who regularly hang out at Steve’s Barber Shop, but that doesn’t mean he understands them. You have to be range-bred, he’s been told often enough, to grasp fully how Montanans feel about their land, their cattle and horses, their customs, their neighbors. Wisconsin farm-bred Ike agrees, but the fact is there’s no other place for him but among these hard-bitten, often quirky people because Pattiann, his wife, is rooted there. They met, almost by accident, at college. They fell in love-more deeply than Ike would have believed possible. And when she left to come home, Ike followed: no other choice. Now, however, there’s the matter of Chas Stubblefield confronting him, and the horrifying drama unfolding on the frost-bound Stubblefield ranch. Day after day, cattle have been dying, starved, because Chas is broke and can’t buy feed for them. It’s reached the point where the herd is beyond saving, where the only remaining question is how to end lives mercifully. Self-centered Chas, blaming everything but his own inept performance as a manager, remains sullen and uncooperative. Everyone in town recognizes how awful the situation is. Everyone knows something should be done, but no one’s going to thank Ike, the outlander, for doing it. Including Pattiann, whose feelings for Chas are complex—part compassion, part nostalgia. And there may be another part, too, Ike can’t help thinking, which is what both scares and infuriates him.
Davis's skill brings wintry Montana alive—predictably bleak, unexpectedly vibrant—and if her characters inch over the top at times, most readers won’t mind unduly.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26140-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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