A darkly comic portrait of one woman's shattering response to divorce: the latest from an author rightly celebrated for writing witty cautionary tales about the contemporary sexual jungle (Trouble, 1993, etc.). ``It is my belief that we are suffering from a perforated personality,'' says Angelica, lying on her bed at London's Claridge's Hotel, and her other personalities—Jelly, Angel, and Lady Rice—all agree. But diagnosis of the problem doesn't necessarily help resolve the situation, which arose when Lady Rice was sued for divorce by her husband, Sir Edwin, whom she still loves. In short, almost terse, chapters that show the disintegration of the lovely and loving Lady Rice, Weldon neatly gores snobbery, class prejudice, and the nastiness of women to other women as she describes just how shattering a marriage's end can be. When Angelica, a former pop-music star, married the impoverished Edwin and became mistress of decrepit Rice Court, she was happy to give her fortune to the devious estate manager, who used it to improve the house and the family's investments. For a while, the couple was happy, and though Lady Rice observed their friends' marriages coming apart, she thought her own secure. Malign forces conspired to end it, however, and she was summarily thrown out of the manor. Using the only credit card she has, Angelica runs up bills at Claridge's while plotting to get back at Edwin—a scheme both helped and hindered by her multiple personalities. Demure Jelly works as a subversive legal secretary; brazen Angel seduces men, including a musically talented chauffeur; and Lady Rice is too upset to do anything, while Angelica is the voice of common sense. But even modern contemporary fables have happy endings, and so finally a new, whole Angelica emerges with an equally new life and love ahead. An unlikely mix of whimsy, wit, and wise insights that works surprisingly well. Weldon in top form. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-599-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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