Gothic lite meets chick lit in a slow potboiler.
Dahlia has a secret, and so does Lucius, and Uncle Brother, and Aunt Baby, and the albino gravedigger.
Dahlia is a successful, beautiful, middle-class African-American woman living in California with a handsome husband and darling daughter. But when we meet her, her need to forget her traumatic past is about to drive her over the edge. A mysterious woman named Phoebe plots to steal Dahlia’s husband, daughter and house. Meanwhile, back in Dallas, her estranged father, Lucius, resists a nervous breakdown while running the funeral home that’s been in the family for three generations. Lucius’s young wife, Mercy Blue, bored with adding red dresses to her collection, is despondent and hysterical. Aunt Baby’s corns are throbbing—a sure sign of trouble—and Percival Tweed, the black albino gravedigger, is restless. What’s everybody so upset about? After 100 pages or so of repetitive set-up and hand-waving (Look! Big Family Trauma!), Pina finally begins to move her plot along, only to quickly halt it again with a series of “revelations” that only occasionally thrill or surprise in spite of their lurid content. The author’s habit of moving from viewpoint to viewpoint provides plenty of stories, but they don’t cohere into a larger one, and the characters don’t emerge as anything but quick, albeit colorful, sketches identified by their quirky habits or physical characteristics. This is particularly problematic with would-be protagonist Dahlia and is exacerbated by the nature of the plot, which requires her to disappear for long stretches. The prose is, on the whole, enjoyable, and thus many readers will overlook the clichés and lack of depth, but fans of Toni Morrison will quickly recognize this author’s inspiration and unfulfilled ambitions.
Gothic lite meets chick lit in a slow potboiler.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-47619-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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