A first-novelist’s in-depth look at a black family’s move into a white world. Mabel, who ranks low on the self-esteem scale, thanks, in part, to a supercritical father, has continually underestimated herself. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s thrilled when “high yellow” newcomer Tom Spader shows up in her hometown of Lovejoy, Illinois, and proposes marriage soon after. Tom has nothing but a burning ambition to succeed in a white man’s world, and, sure enough, by the time the couple has three young children—Hilary, Stormy and Tommy—he’s a successful attorney at an otherwise all-white law firm, with dreams for even bigger and better things. When a controversial case involving a black man accused of arson turns the Spaders— minority friends and neighbors against them, it nevertheless earns Tom a promotion, and he decides, without consulting his wife, to move the whole family to lily-white, snobby Greenwich, Connecticut. On Mabel’s first day in Greenwich, a neighbor mistakes her for a maid, and from there on, Åber-suburban life goes from bad to worse. Mabel likes her own new maid, Sylvia, but Tom would be furious if she were ever to socialize with Sylvia and her friends or even attend a service with them at the nearest black church. The PTA agrees to meet at Mabel’s house, and although the women seem pleasant at first (Tom has instructed Mabel on what foods to serve and how to hold her teacup), they quickly show their true colors. As for the kids, the Greenwich schoolchildren aren’t any more open-minded than their parents; racial slurs, offensive jokes and other forms of cruelty are the norm. Eventually, Tom earns a judgeship, but Mabel remains ambivalent about his success. By the disturbing finish, the man’s real nature is revealed—and Mabel has to come to terms with her privileged children and precarious perch on the border of two very different worlds. Ellis has an appealing style and doesn—t resort to easy answers or platitudes—a combination that makes for a promising debut.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44876-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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