Extended meanderings through the thickets of pleasure and regret, without a convincing summing up. The protagonist of newcomer Larson's novel is Joe Stoyanovich, who could well be described as a case of arrested development. A writer of children's books, he dabbles in historical scholarship and political activism and hangs out with a circle of friends whose exceedingly meager careers serve in some sense to magnify his own. The son of old-style leftists, named after Stalin and raised to revere Khrushchev, he finds himself unable to forgive his father for abandoning his mother to marry a much younger woman—while his father, in turn, resents Joe for his role in the accidental death of his younger brother. Joe himself is going through several more contemporary traumas, not the least of which is the abortion that his girlfriend has just told him about (after the fact). His biggest concern, however, is the sexual abuse charge that a local 13-year-old has filed against him. Felice, the girl in question, recants her in-court testimony at the last minute, but not before Joe finds himself thoroughly tarred in public as a pedophile. Although his reactions and concerns regarding the trial make up much of his story, there is a strange distance in his musings that suggests something other than stoicism, and this general lack of passion seems to inform the work throughout: ``In the final analysis, the fact that I never meant to touch Felice inappropriately, or that I may not have caused my brother's death are trivial considerations.'' Whether Joe is traumatized, cold- blooded, or emotionally retarded in some other, unexplained, way does not finally matter, of course. What is frustrating is how his profound uncertainty about the importance of his life quickly permeates the story and infects the reader. Competently written but thoroughly flat and ultimately annoying.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-877946-90-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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