Hooray for Nora Jane!
Collected for the first time in one volume, these 14 stories and one new novella chronicle the life and times of the indomitable Nora Jane Whittington.
Early on, Nora Jane’s grandmother tells her that she comes from a long line of strong women with strong genes and must act accordingly. In these stories, Nora Jane, one of National Book Award–winner Gilchrist’s perennial protagonists, does just that. At 19, without family or funds, she learns the art of armed robbery (using a theatrical prop gun) from a handsome anarchist, Sandy, whom she follows from New Orleans to San Francisco. There, she holds up Freddy, the owner of an independent bookstore. At gunpoint, he quotes T.S. Eliot, and later that night they wind up in his hot tub together. Torn between the two men, Nora Jane conceives and gives birth to twin daughters with different fathers. Freddy eventually wins her hand. Over the years, Freddy, Nora Jane and the twins become integral to many who gravitate toward Nora Jane’s outlook on life, which may be summarized thus: Make no plans. Just move as fast as you can in the direction of the people that you love. A renowned film critic abandons his success and returns to academic life, where he meets his wife; a priest discovers that his true calling is to love Mitzi, Nora Jane’s beautician; a mountain lion nicknamed Alabama joins the clan. Even Leonardo da Vinci drops in for a tour of UC Berkeley’s bio-chem lab. Of course, there are earthquakes and tremors, both real and figurative, along the way. And the novella opens with seismic news: Freddy has leukemia. How Nora Jane and her loved ones mobilize to join forces with science and spirituality to save Freddy’s life brings both Gilchrist’s family of characters and her bedrock themes to artful maturation. Very few writers can write intelligent comedy about the philosophical pursuit of happiness. Laurie Colwin was one. Ellen Gilchrist is another.
Hooray for Nora Jane!Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-05838-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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