A laudable set of premises, but thin writing and faux disclosures keep this garden from bursting into full bloom.
A debut collection from a Minnesota writer pits its mainly suburban characters against a nature that is both unforgiving and creepily profligate.
Sosin has a gift for the narrative hook. Many of these 12 stories place their protagonists in potentially humiliating situations, then watch them struggle out with varying degrees of grace. In ``Internal Medicine,'' a woman talks a group of firstyear medical students through her own pelvic exam while pondering her recent divorce. ``Ice Age'' gives us a resentful farmer who, cornered by his own act of kindness, finds himself trapped at an awkward dinner with yuppies he despises for encroaching on his land. At her best, Sosin is able to milk these reversaloffortune setups to alchemical effect. ``Mother Superior,” one of the best pieces here and the only one to depart from a middleclass milieu, follows a burntout former bar owner through a date gone sadly wrong; the quietly devastating climax feels like a slap not only to her face, but to ours. Elsewhere, though, these revelations can sound like unintentional punch lines, especially when allegories from nature start gumming up the works. ``Submersion'' draws a clunky parallel between a woman's obsessive vigil over a turtle nest on a Mexican beach and the recent drowning death of her son, revealed at the end in a distinctly unsurprising twist. ``There Are No Green Butterflies'' solemnly depicts the unraveling of a nascent romance that the reader is unlikely to mourn (`` `Sex is holy,' he says, looking off in the distance''). Only the title story steps back from this relentless intersubjectivity, offering a restrained, almost photographic vignette of the varied urban types frequenting a public greenhouse. Meanwhile, Sosin's generally graceful prose has moments of startling infelicity: one heroine lies in bed ``exacerbated,'' wielding ``the fineedged knife of selfblame.''
A laudable set of premises, but thin writing and faux disclosures keep this garden from bursting into full bloom.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56689-100-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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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