Excessive navel-gazing and self-pity get in the way of the sharp observations and sense of humor that newcomer Burns...
Blow-by-blow account of a woman’s struggle to keep her sanity despite an autistic daughter and bipolar husband: a debut that tries to be both an issue-novel and an exploration of selfhood.
Narrator Bridget Fox is not a happy camper. A New Yorker by upbringing and inclination, she has recently moved to Minneapolis because her sculptor husband, Pierce, has a tenured teaching position there. Stuck in what she considers the boondocks caring for her two daughters, two-year-old Cleo and almost five-year-old Maeve, Bridget must watch from afar as her cousin/best friend Nessa dies of breast cancer and her brilliant and beloved if alcoholic father—as opposed to her distant, utterly sane mother—succumbs to kidney cancer. Meanwhile, Maeve’s development isn’t on track. She doesn’t talk or play normally and soon is diagnosed as autistic. Still grieving over the deaths, Bridget schleps Maeve to special classes, follows medication procedures, cleans up after her. Everyone tells Bridget how well she’s holding up, but she describes in detail just how scared and ambivalent she actually feels. The reader is never allowed to forget that this woman has had horribly bad luck. To top it off, Pierce turns out to be manic-depressive, requiring hospital stays and more medication-scheduling. Bridget joins a support group and almost takes up again with her first husband. Her mother drops in and offers unexpected solace. Maeve becomes only harder to handle while Cleo blossoms. Pierce ends up in the emergency ward. Bridget copes—until suddenly she can’t anymore and downs sleeping pills. Now she’s the one in the hospital coming to grips with her suppressed anger (as if she hasn’t been expressing it loudly all along) and with the need to place Maeve in a facility. Rising to the occasion, Pierce takes over at home. Bridget recovers. Maeve is placed. A shaky stability arrives.
Excessive navel-gazing and self-pity get in the way of the sharp observations and sense of humor that newcomer Burns displays.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-4022-0041-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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