At once folksy and urbane, this debut collection of stories pulses with the lifeblood of the forgotten neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., where Jones's black people are less the victims of society than of fate and chance. What unites the multihued African-Americans here is their sense of loss, whether it's of a family member taken in casual violence, or of one's soul, lost to drugs or ambition. A parentless teenager in ``The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,'' a girl full of confidence and spunk, finds her world shattered by her best friend's senseless death. Similarly, a middle-class man, leading ``a civilized life'' in the city, is devastated when his 15-year- old daughter runs away from home, never to return (``A New Man''). A motherless girl fills the void in her life with pigeons, until they too die or abandon the dying neighborhood (``The Girl Who Raised Pigeons''). Jones's unsparing view encompasses the hustler of ``Young Lions,'' a petty crook who enlists his loving girlfriend in a cruel scam; the middle-aged mother in ``His Mother's House,'' who ignores the source of her drug-dealing son's beneficence; and the high-powered lawyer in the title piece, who anesthetizes herself from her past with cocaine and passionless sex. But there's struggle, uplift, and survival in adversity here as well. In ``The Store,'' an unambitious young man grumbles through menial jobs, until he ends up attending Georgetown, in spite of himself. A dignified divorced woman keeps her family together in ``An Orange Line Train to Ballston.'' And a grown-up brother and sister cope differently with their father, who has spent most of their lives in jail for murdering their mother (``The Sunday Following Mother's Day''). Jones unerringly captures the quiet stateliness of elderly women in a trio of stories, culminating in ``Marie,'' which is his most self-reflexive piece. A skillful, elegiac collection, with remarkably little sociology.
Pub Date: June 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-688-11526-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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