A quirkily convincing but ultimately stagnant tale.
Stucky-French follows her story collection (The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa, 2000) with a soggy first novel about family relationships and synchronized swimming.
France has been happily living in Indianapolis ever since she traded in her husband Ray for her “downwardly mobile” high-school boyfriend-cum-artist Bruno, and her social work career for a job at the gallery Womenspace. But when a call comes from her father, North, in Tampa, to say that her mother has disappeared, the problem isn’t just that of a missing wife. North seems unconcerned about Grendy, who he claims has run off; what worries him is who will take care of six-year-old Theo, the odd fatherless child of Beauvais, France’s black sheep sister who was killed in an automobile accident just when she was getting her life back on track. When France flies to Tampa, she finds not only a strangely distant North and a needy Theo but a disgruntled group of aging women who perform underwater wearing mermaid tails at Mermaid Springs. The “Mermaids of Yesteryear,” or the “Merhags,” as they call themselves, need Grendy, who, re-donning her tail at age 60, snagged the star role in their new production, “Mermaids on the Moon.” France has her own problems, hoping to become a partner in the gallery back home but terrified that the owner, Naomi, will be furious to find out that France’s most profitable artistic discovery, Bruno’s life-sized dolls, are actually the creation of a male artist. All ends well when France confronts her father, relishes her time with Theo, confesses to Naomi, and rises to the challenge of rehearsing her mother’s part as an astronaut in the mermaid extravaganza.
A quirkily convincing but ultimately stagnant tale.Pub Date: June 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49894-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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