A lyrical and earthy meditation on the limits and glories of being human.
A slim novel from Steinke (Jesus Saves, 1997, etc.) follows three lonely souls in Brooklyn seeking love and a connection with the infinite.
Mary, Walter and John all have their crosses to bear. Mary is a new mother, and her husband, an aloof hipster, is cheating on her. Her friend Walter is a gay Episcopalian priest exiled from his Manhattan church to a Brooklyn parish after he wrote a compromising letter to a teenaged boy who’d captured his heart, while the priest’s true love, the late Carlos, is now just a box of ash. And John has just left a monastery, 15 years after entering it in the wake of his pregnant wife’s death. All three characters are seized with an urge to understand God’s way of working in their daily lives. Things begin at Christmastime, when Mary leaves her husband after sleeping with John, whom she met in a local coffeeshop, to come live with Walter. Walter, especially lonely for Carlos during the holiday, has a series of unfulfilling sexual encounters in Manhattan bars and beds. John finds a more affordable apartment and wishes Mary would share it. That’s about it for plot, since the real glory here lies not in action but in Steinke’s ability to combine the mundane and the divine so gracefully. We read that, for Walter, “all through his life, things outside the church were just as holy as the crosses and statues inside,” and, indeed, love, sex, and god all keep close company here. New mother Mary is hungry for sexual contact with her husband; Walter frequents Internet S&M Web sites; John feels closer to God after leaving his order and becoming physically intimate with Mary. But this is no soft-focus fable. Walter, after finding Mary praying in the closet a dozen times, can’t help but wish that she’d go on Zoloft in order to get along more easily in the human realm.
A lyrical and earthy meditation on the limits and glories of being human.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-529-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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