Woodrell’s second book, Woe to Live On (1987), is being filmed by Ang Lee, and the author seems to have pitched this, his sixth low-down and dirty novel, to the big screen: his no-account characters and their dumb-as-a-stump doings have that over-the-top quality that transfers neatly to the movies; and his downbeat ending, with its teenaged femme fatale, is pure Hollywood noir. None of which is to say that here is inferior Woodrell. His singular voice still captures the redneck poetry of everyday peckerwood speech, and his tough-guy posturings reveal themselves as empty gestures. Add to that a new sense of class conflict as it plays itself out in semirural Missouri. Woodrell’s loser narrator, 24-year-old Sammy Barlach, comes from Blue Knee, Arkansas, —an hour and a tall beer to the Delta side of Little Rock.— A self-described —cranked-out dipshit,— Sammy can—t hold a job or a woman and soon falls into the —nutsy actin— — of two other, less lumpy lumpen proles who were also —born shoved to the margins of the world.— Nineteen-year-old Jamalee Merridew, with the tomato-red hair celebrated in the title, hopes to escape the grind of low living by exploiting the phenomenal beauty of her younger brother, Jason, a budding beautician whose uncertain sexuality renders his sister’s blackmail scheme moot. The siblings— unmarried mother, Bev, —a Barbie who has gone to seed on roadhouse whiskey and pan-fried chicken,— supports her clan on her back. Jamalee meanwhile studies etiquette and dreams of living high. When her plans take a downward turn, with brutal consequences, Sammy—himself —craving to be a hero——just proves the truth of his down-home Hobbesianism: life is —glum and grim and nasty.— Woodrell’s sorry country folk —live fast— and —learn slow,— as Jamalee puts it, and their tale provides lots of low comedy—and no small amount of pathos.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5577-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
IN THE NEWS
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
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