Beautifully written, stringently unsentimental, and yet tender in its empathy for the perennial human conflict between...
Poliner’s follow-up to Mutual Life & Casualty (2005) limns a Jewish family too close-knit for its individual members’ good.
“The summer of 1948 my brother Davy was killed in an accident,” Molly tells us in her first sentence. Twelve years old at the time, she looks back from the vantage point of 1999 to consider the fraught family dynamic that contributed to the accident. The Syrkin sisters—Vivie, Bec, and Molly’s mother, Ada—summer every year with their families on “Bagel Beach,” one of the few portions of the Connecticut shore open to Jews. Their distrust of outsiders is understandable, with the Holocaust a recent memory, but as Molly’s narration delves into dramas from before and after Davy’s death, we see that the family’s collective needs too often take precedence over personal happiness—especially if it involves moving beyond their tight little community’s boundaries. Molly’s uncle Nelson lost the love of his life when he dutifully went to work in the family department store instead of pursuing the academic career he wanted. Her brother Howard, in love with an Irish Catholic girl, rejects her after Davy’s death, seeing it as punishment for being “self-indulgent.” Molly’s cousin Nina also takes away from the accident a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness to be loved that scars her life. Warm scenes of Shabbos dinners and summer leisure evoke the appeal of this sheltering world, but an ugly quarrel between Molly’s parents makes clear that it's governed by strict rules, and those who violate them will be punished. Selfish, fun-loving, ultimately devastated Ada is perhaps the most emotionally tangled family member, but Poliner depicts each character with sensitivity and insight. Molly’s coming-of-age is the delicate connective tissue that binds together the novel’s chronologically fragmented episodes, revealing them as pieces in a mosaic of enlarged understanding—the narrator’s and ours.
Beautifully written, stringently unsentimental, and yet tender in its empathy for the perennial human conflict between service and self.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38411-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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