Certainly better than much that’s out there, though not one of the author’s best.
Kagan, author of several smart, grown-up novels (No Good-Byes, 2000, etc.), stumbles with this work on adultery, despite the novelty of taking both the wife and girlfriend’s point of view.
In their unspoken arrangement, Rachel Glass expects Jack North to make the seven-hour drive once each month from his home to hers. During the other three weeks, Jack, a retired Beverly Hills policeman, lives a predictable life as husband to Linda, his wife of 31 years. Rachel knows he’s married, and Linda knows her husband has been having an affair for the past six years, yet the three live a barely palatable lie of omission, each for their own reasons. When Jack once fails to arrive at Rachel’s house at the appointed time, she panics and does the unthinkable—calls Linda. And so the search for Mr. North begins, though there’s little suspense involved: it’s clear from the start that Jack has had an accident of some kind and it’s just a matter of time until his body is found. But the novel plays over the minutia of his double life—or, more pointedly, over the consequences of adultery on the two women involved. An independent, urbane mother of two grown children, Rachel admits she’s too smart to play the role of the other woman, but love has no logic. Likewise, Linda, devoted to Jack, struggles silently with the habitual lies she must tell her daughters when they ask where their father has gone. The one pivotal scene, when the two women finally confront each other, comes at story's end, too late to be gratifying and making the reader wonder why more of the novel wasn’t filled with such edgy, vibrant stuff. Kagan is unafraid to face hard questions about the human heart, but she creates something here too emotionally repetitious to be successful, especially in this plot’s small scope.
Certainly better than much that’s out there, though not one of the author’s best.Pub Date: May 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-018474-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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