Mildly entertaining, but the plot was fresher 15 years ago in the movie Wall Street, and there’s not a character as...
Krist’s third novel (after Chaos Theory, 2000, etc.) reminds us that there have been other New Economies as he blends his ambitious hero’s adventures in 1690s London with similar events in New York from September 1999 to March 2000.
Twenty-year-old William Merrick, “fourth son in a family whose brickworks would only comfortably support three,” goes to work for his uncle, prominent wine merchant Gilbert Hawking, but is far more interested in “the joyous intricacies of what was then called Dutch finance—that new, uncharted world of notes and shares an annuities.” Will is a classic young man on the make in 17th-century London until Chapter Three, when the hackney coach hailed in ‘Change Alley turns into a 20th-century taxi at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway. From then on, his first-person narrative alternates between the two periods but tells the same story in both. Uncle Gilbert entrusts Will with the nebulous task of helping him connect with companies creating new technologies. Among these is “an electronic switching thingie” developed by Benjamin Fletcher (in the 17th century, he’s come up with a new kind of winch), whose alluring sister Eliza wants “to open a chain of socially-responsible restaurants” (or “a series of charitable chophouses” circa 1690). Will is almost as attracted to Eliza as he is to the seemingly limitless potential for making money dangled in front of him by Ted Witherspoon, a promoter of IPOs (called “projects” in 17th-century London). The dual time frame is a clever gimmick, but no more than a gimmick as Will makes the familiar journey from hungry apprenticeship to unmerited affluence to deserved comeuppance. He makes money, but he loses the girl. This won’t bother readers much, however, since Eliza, is as one-dimensional as the rest of the schematic cast.
Mildly entertaining, but the plot was fresher 15 years ago in the movie Wall Street, and there’s not a character as galvanizing as Gordon Gekko anywhere in sight.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1330-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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