A modest and quiet work that draws the outlines of a vanished world with exceptional ease and grace.
First novel by journalist and storywriter Delaney (The Drowning, 1999) portrays life on and off the floor of a New England textile mill.
It’s the summer of 1978, and the Chace Finishing Mill is one of those cavernous old factories that sprang up in the 19th century across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island like mushrooms after heavy rain. Most of these places are long since shuttered, but in the late ’70s Chace was still up and running, if not exactly thriving. Delaney re-creates the era by following a handful of employees through their daily routines across several months. There’s Carey, the leader of the loading crew, who dreams of becoming foreman and worries over the impending death of his gravely ill wife. Forklift driver Machado, an immigrant from the Azores, resists his own wife’s pleas to return to his homeland and retire there on his company pension, while 16-year-old Dominic drops out of high school as soon as he can to work at the mill and prove his worth to his embittered, crippled father. The monotony of the days is broken by the usual workplace distractions—the company softball team, for example—and by the inevitable bickering with and about the management, represented by foreman Parry and plant manager “Fat Pat” Harrigan. Delaney writes in an understated, almost neutral tone that evokes the time and place without begging the reader’s sympathy or indulgence, and he succeeds in making ordinary events and annoyances (quarrels over overtime pay, embarrassment at the charity of friends) typify the people and place he describes.
A modest and quiet work that draws the outlines of a vanished world with exceptional ease and grace.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57962-098-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
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