Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long.
In a near future fraught with violent anti-Semitism, a family Passover focuses on patricide.
Julian Jacobson is surely among the worst fathers in literary history, raising his children with vitriol, shame, and aggression, treating their mother no better. He tried to poison his adoring daughter by giving her food she was allergic to and relentlessly abused his sons in truly evil ways. Somehow the kids got through it, damaged as they may be. Each gets a chunk of this book devoted to his or her perspective; a penultimate chapter full of twists and revelations lets us into their mother’s head. Moses, the oldest, is an actor with a reality show called The JacobSONS! about his life with wife Pandora and their triplets and twins, all boys. Edith is a promiscuous and unhappy professor of ethics at Emory, currently up on charges of sexual harassment. At 38, Jacob is the youngest and arguably the most alienated. He lives in Berlin with a German boyfriend named Dietrich and has documented the family nightmare in childhood journals he calls My Manifest of Meanness and later in his plays, the first of which shares the title of this novel. When the siblings learn their mother has lung cancer and has only a short time to live, they are certain their father is making her last months on Earth miserable and could even be intentionally hastening her death, since he’s been after her money all along. Though they sort of hate each other, the three plan a family get-together at Moses’ house in Los Angeles—nominally for Passover, but actually to kill their dad, which is going to be tricky since Seder at The JacobSONS! will be broadcast live. In Levinson’s (Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, 2013) dystopian 2022, the state of Israel is no more, having been carved up by Syria, Iran, and Lebanon after a war during which the United States stood aside. Now 4 million refugees have relocated to the U.S., provoking an intense xenophobic reaction and constant domestic terrorism. There’s a lot to admire here, and a bit to be annoyed with, too—Levinson is a habitual overexplainer and loves nothing like a good back story.
Imaginative, intelligent, cluttered, long on black humor, and just long.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49688-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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