More catechism than novel—with wooden characters, minimal plot, and dialogue so absurd (“a mystery school . . . is a place...
More New Age yarnspinning from pop guru Chopra (Soulmate, 2001, etc.), this time about a young Boston writer’s quest for spiritual fulfillment.
Plenty of people have trouble settling down in their 20s. Take Jess Conover. At 28, Jeff is still an aspiring writer (emphasis on “aspiring”) who ekes out a living as the rewrite man at a weekly paper in Boston. Jeff’s girlfriend Renee recently left him, but they’re still in touch and may get back together. Meanwhile, Jeff’s older sister Linny, married and with children, is eager for Jeff to find himself and raise a family. But Jeff just can’t make the commitment. All in all, Jeff is a normal American twentysomething (i.e., a superannuated adolescent). Then one day he finds an intriguing classified ad in the Boston Globe: “Love has found you. Tell no one, just come.” The ad also lists a New Hampshire phone number and (most mysterious of all) the initials “JC” (as in Jeff Conover). Jeff calls and is told to drive to New Hampshire immediately. There’s a blizzard raging outside and his ancient Camry has bald tires and a weak transmission, but he hits the road without a second thought and drives straight to the address he was given. There, he meets Dolly, an older lady who is known as a “wise woman,” and Elena, who is about Jeff’s age. Dolly and Elena are part of a secret society called the Daughters of Joy, and their mission is to initiate Jeff into “the subtle world” of spiritual bliss. This entails out-of-body experiences, hallucinations and dreams, and a lot of talk about love and mystery. Eventually, Jeff and Elena start a mystery school in Boston to carry on the work of enlightening the spiritually precocious. And Jeff finally finds out what the point of his life is.
More catechism than novel—with wooden characters, minimal plot, and dialogue so absurd (“a mystery school . . . is a place where you learn that love is a mystery”) that even Kahlil Gibran would break out laughing.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14948-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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