One hopes the gifted Leavitt is capable of much better work. But the clock is ticking.
Leavitt’s ungainly sixth novel appears to be an amalgam of transposed autobiography, literary in-talk, and the emphasis on family dynamics that distinguished his early work (The Lost Language of Cranes, 1986, etc.).
His complicated story is narrated in retrospect by Judith “Denny” Denham, secretary and mistress to Ernest Wright, a psychology prof at California’s Wellspring University, and captive piano-playing partner and exploited houseguest of Ernest’s intense, busy wife Nancy. The early chapters feature solid and sometimes amusing writing about college life and how it influences families. But the tale slackens when its serpentine plot—initiated by a volatile 1969 Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Wrights—kicks off. Tensions surround the Wrights: eldest son Mark flees the draft by moving to Canada; teenaged daughter Daphne sleeps with an older man; Nancy presumably senses Ernest’s adulteries (but neither confides in nor confronts Denny). And 15-year-old Ben Wright, a fledgling poet burdened with multiple insecurities, attracts the possibly improper attention of Nancy’s old friend Anne Armstrong, while playing disciple to Anne’s undisciplined husband Jonah Boyd, a novelist who has the irrational habit of continually losing notebooks containing his work-in-progress. One such loss mars that Thanksgiving Day, and resonates long afterward—as we learn from Denny’s exhaustive account of her reunion (after Nancy has died and Ernest been murdered) with Ben (now himself a successful novelist) and Ben’s disclosure of secrets he has kept since 1969. This all feels like much ado about rather little, and none of it is especially believable. It’s hard not to infer a correlation between this book’s plot and the notoriety that surrounded Leavitt’s third novel, While England Sleeps (1993), allegedly partially plagiarized. That’s about as interesting as Jonah Boyd ever gets.
One hopes the gifted Leavitt is capable of much better work. But the clock is ticking.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-188-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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