Fritters away its initial momentum with a rambling, slack storyline.
The relationship between an aspiring writer and her mentor, tracked over two decades.
It’s spring semester 1994, and Isabelle Rothman is a senior at Chandler College in Los Angeles. She signs up for a writing tutorial with visiting professor Daniel Jablonski, a novelist whose early literary success has dwindled to nothing, leaving him blocked, depressed, and agoraphobic. He's known on campus as a difficult, unresponsive man, but Isabelle elicits a far livelier reaction from him. The first part of Goldstone’s (Tell Me One Thing, 2014) debut novel focuses on the development of their mutually inspiring relationship and of Isabelle’s novel, which is about a “girl who commits crimes”—a girl quite different than her self-effacing creator. After graduation (and an abbreviated but creepy make-out session), Daniel and Isabelle are parted for many years, continuing their relationship sporadically by email. She goes home to Long Island and her unpleasant family, then back to California, where a passionate interlude with a blond soccer player changes her life permanently. Daniel, who has a troubled, unfriendly family of his own, bounces from LA to Colorado, then to Iowa City, then is grudgingly taken in by his alienated daughter in New Hampshire. The obscure little town she lives in agrees with him; finally able to overcome his agoraphobia and his writer’s block, he publishes a novel based on his relationship with Isabelle. However, what he sees as a loving tribute strikes her as literary larceny, and she races across the country to tell him off. Since this encounter resolves the central conflict of the novel, it’s surprising to see there’s still a big chunk of pages left. This final section jumps ahead to 2014, introducing new characters and situations it’s hard to maintain interest in.
Fritters away its initial momentum with a rambling, slack storyline.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54123-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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