Listfield (Variations in the Night, 1987, etc.) sets her fourth novel in a suburb of Albany, NY, where a community is torn over whether the death of Ann Waring, killed during a quarrel with her husband Ted when his hunting rifle discharged, was an accident or a murder. At the time of Ann's death, she and Ted were beginning to reconcile their differences even as they waited for divorce papers to go through. The premise is promising but, except for the victim and her sister Sandy, Listfield's characters are puppetlike: Ted the self-made man, slow to compromise, quick to anger; his career- minded lawyer, rising on the notoriety of a murder trial; Julia, the teen-rebel daughter; and Ali, her eager-to-please sister. Central to the novel's failure to convince is the author's distaste for the defendant. Though Ted's pain and possessive love are detailed for over half the book, we never empathize with him as we do with Ann and Sandy, whose bond was forged amid the clutter- -emotional and physical—of their parents' oddball marriage. A second handicap is Listfield's patronizing attitude toward the region she's describing, which she renders as a wasteland where anyone with ambition is merely marking time. Her metaphors are often overwrought: The family's tragedy is compared to ``the single misstep that left you chained like Prometheus to Mount Caucasus, with guts to be picked over afresh each day.'' Ted's hotshot lawyer, unable to size up his client, is like ``a lover who punishes the other for what he himself no longer feels.'' A pale reminder of Rosellen Brown's Before and After, this novel is as much about acts of survival as about acts of love, about the compulsions—lawful or otherwise—that drive desperate people. Unfortunately, there are few surprises, and none of the blood-chilling suspense it takes to create a page-turner.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85278-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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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