An overcooked, incoherent stew of references.
A debut work crammed with metatextual trickery, references to everything from Nabokov to Pynchon to Scandinavian mythology, and thickly ironic humor—a literary-gamesmanship machine kicked into overdrive.
Long’s first novel initially comes on like a murder mystery. Shirley MacGuffin had been editing a version of Hamlet, by Thomas Kyd, until she died—the day before Bean Day, a celebration honoring an adventurer who discovered the mythical Icelandic land of Vanaheim. Bean’s daughter, Our Heroine—really, her name is Our Heroine—charges herself with solving Shirley’s murder in the tourist-crammed town of New Cruiskeen, Penn., though she has to find her missing dog as well. Got all that? No matter. The book isn’t so much a mystery as it is a goof on the genre, and Shirley isn’t really a crucial character. (Hitchcock fans might have guessed that from Shirley’s surname.) It is structured as a “discovered” novel, with an editor inserting persnickety and increasingly unhinged footnotes (just like Pale Fire), has a middle section with interior monologues by individual characters (just like As I Lay Dying) and includes a handsome male sidekick for Our Heroine, who eventually explains it all in the final pages (just like in a potboiler thriller). And just like most postmodern novels, it’s exasperating and too clever by half—Long is so busy struggling to wade through a chin-high swamp of literary cataloguing that he has little energy left for anything resembling characterization, forcing the reader to keep track of a host of New Cruiskeen residents even while he asks you to reject conventional notions about plot. The book’s most interesting and comic characters, in fact, are two of its most minor—Wible & Pacheco, a Rosenkrantz-and-Guildenstern-like dynamic duo of pretentiousness who roam the town as self-styled “philosophical investigators.” The way the two get mocked for their pomposity suggests that Long knows how far off the deep end he’s gone. But while the willful goofiness makes it somewhat more penetrable, it doesn’t salvage it.
An overcooked, incoherent stew of references.Pub Date: May 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-932416-51-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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