A refreshing departure from the obsessive redundancy of its predecessors. Probably Cooper’s best yet.
And now for something different from the master of homosexual punk sadomasochism.
A teenaged boy does die in Cooper’s latest (after My Loose Thread, 2001, etc.), but this time he isn’t tortured, murdered or flayed. As this novel’s terse episodes gradually disclose, 17-year-old Tommy Baxter perished in the car crash that left his father Jim disabled, grief-stricken and guilty (for the two had gotten “stoned together” shortly before the accident). We learn this in early scenes set at Jim’s place of employment (which makes outré children’s costumes), then in scenes at the Baxter home, where Jim and his stunned wife Bette grow increasingly estranged and Jim is having an outdoor “monument” built for Tommy. The “building” under construction copies a mysterious house in a video game (itself copied from a Nintendo original) that Tommy had designed—with which Jim now occupies himself, imagining that he’s entering into the computerized landscape where his son’s mind had lived and where Tommy had exercised a control acknowledged by its digitally formed creatures (“. . . the consensus here,” one of the creatures informs Jim, “is that Tommy bear was God”). Cooper assembles this sorrowful story quite skillfully, showing Jim’s destroyed relationship with Bette, gathering the comments of friends and experts (a video analyst, a psychic) on both Tommy’s fantasies and Jim’s absorption in them, and high-lighting the “false world” of the video game: a quest whose object draws Jim ever closer to its revelatory center. The ingenuity of the narrative, though it’s slightly forced, is indeed compelling. Still, the best things here are Jim’s disclosures of his piercing, unending grief over the loss of the son he loved—and grew close to—too late (“I never thought there was much of me in him. I guess since he died there’s been a ton of him in me”).
A refreshing departure from the obsessive redundancy of its predecessors. Probably Cooper’s best yet.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-7011-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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