McKinney-Whetstone’s third novel (Tempest Rising, 1998, etc.) examines a contemporary African-American community in Philadelphia, but her elementary plot and monochromatic characters don—t leave much of an impression. Verdi is in her 40s, her past marked by a brief episode of heroin use in college during the 1970s. Flashbacks reveal that taking heroin was in part a dark spinoff of her wild love for Johnson, with whom she discovered the rapture of souls at age 19. After Verdi passed out in her own vomit in a campus men’s room, her snooty history professor, Rowe, chivalrously took her home, where he and his wife, Penda, nursed her back to stability, kept up appearances for her family, and prevented her expulsion from school. Eventually, Rowe left Penda for Verdi, and they have lived in tense affection for several decades. Now Johnson’s back in town, a drug-free fund-raiser for nonprofit organizations. He never did like Rowe, though he has to admit that his rival saved Verdi’s life. But now that life seems a ho-hum round of scheduled pleasures, and when her cousin Kitt hooks up the former lovers, Verdi and Johnson’s passion reignites. Is it peril or paradise? While Verdi’s torn between gratitude to Rowe and desire for Johnson, her aunt Posie has a stroke. But Kitt’s mute daughter, Sage, sees beautiful colors when Johnson and Verdi reconnect. Stressed out by the whole business, Verdi goes to the brink of doing heroin again, but Sage will rescue her from disaster. Aunt Posie is going to be fine, Rowe is revealed to be a soulless pretender, and Johnson and Verdi get it all back together. The author’s fans will enjoy her extended scenes of domestic life and conflict, and will know enough not to expect the same sort of rapture that Verdi shares with Johnson.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-14995-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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