Though ambitious in its goals, the book stumbles, causing Willie and his family to suffer more than they already have.
The imminent execution of a black man shows the level of injustice a town’s white residents are willing to endure in this historical novel inspired by real events.
Eighteen-year-old Willie Jones sits in a Louisiana jail cell in 1943 awaiting his final punishment, death, for raping a white woman, though the reader learns that the two were involved in a romantic relationship and Willie was arrested after her father discovered them together. The story unfolds as the electric chair makes its way to New Iberia, where Willie and those who wish to see him dead await. Winthrop (The Why of Things, 2013, etc.) deploys the perspectives of several characters—some more directly involved in Willie’s fate than others—creating a narrative that causes readers to confront the difference between what is legal and what is just. Power and agency are the sole province of white men, and heavy is the burden—for at least one character. Polly Livingstone, the lawyer who prosecuted Willie but is unsure of his guilt, spends much time agonizing over his role in the process. And Winthrop provides nice nuance by showing that Polly’s decision to follow Southern custom by ensuring that a black man suspected of being involved with a white woman is put to death was more complicated than readers might have assumed. Meanwhile, those who care the most about Willie are those who can do the least for him, including Polly’s wife, Nell; the town priest, Father Hannigan; and most notably Ora, the wife of the local gas station operator, whose motives are not entirely clear. Winthrop writes most tenderly of Willie’s father, Frank, who is trying to ensure that his son has a proper headstone, a task he’s understandably avoided. Unfortunately, Frank’s role, and those of the other black characters, is marginal, as the book is more dedicated to exposing how the whites who are sympathetic to what Willie represents inevitably fail him. Winthrop does so by invoking those all-too-familiar tropes of Southern literature—the ridiculously hot day; the white bystanders in front of the courthouse; and the Northerner who cannot jibe with those curious Southerners and their ways.
Though ambitious in its goals, the book stumbles, causing Willie and his family to suffer more than they already have.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2818-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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