A novel about friendship, betrayal and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop could have been satisfying in any number of ways, but with...
In Evans’ latest (Suicide’s Girlfriend, 2002, etc.), a friendship that has been dead for 20 years is suddenly exhumed.
When Charlotte Price started at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1988, she was thrilled to fall easily into a friendship with the gorgeous and vibrant Esmé Cole. “Female friendships always had been so hard for me, fraught with relentless deconstructions of who liked who better, but this person seemed utterly available!” narrates the older Charlotte. The two women became roommates for a semester while Charlotte’s boyfriend, Will, was away in Italy. Yet their relationship didn’t continue. After Esmé became pregnant and left the workshop with her boyfriend and fellow writing student, Jeremy Fletcher, a disagreeable Southerner with a Confederate flag tattoo, Charlotte finished her degree, married Will, moved into a tenure-track job in Tucson and wrote four novels. Although she finds out later that Esmé also moved to Tucson with Jeremy, the two women’s paths do not cross until Esmé unexpectedly drops in on Charlotte one morning 20 years after they last saw each other. The years have not been kind to Esmé: “A stout, red-faced woman stood on our front steps. Boxy, olive pantsuit. Cropped hair the color of Vaseline.” Esmé’s visit causes a crisis for Charlotte as she looks back on the end of their relationship, scarred by a secret betrayal that still haunts her. When Esmé’s intentions turn out to be less than friendly, Charlotte has to reckon with the consequences of her past behavior and hope for forgiveness. What Esmé ultimately wants from Charlotte is intriguing and dangerous, but it comes too late in the story for it to infuse it with much-needed tension, and the most dynamic characters, Esmé and Jeremy, are pushed into the background through Charlotte’s neurotic, self-indulgent narration. Because the stakes are never high enough, there is no sense of mourning for this dead relationship.
A novel about friendship, betrayal and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop could have been satisfying in any number of ways, but with a floundering plot and tiresome narration, there are too many missed opportunities here.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-298-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
PROFILES
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
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
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