Readers will get a mildly informative look at the money-drenched world of finance but may be hard-pressed to finish this...
A dreary look into the inner life of a cash-rich, joy-poor Manhattan financial analyst, courtesy of second-novelist Sernovitz (Great American Plain, 2001).
Chris Kelch earns $500K a year at Freshler Feld as the company’s fifth-ranked analyst, age 28. His understanding of the market—though in bleak moments he concedes that no one understands it—and his ability to make others move huge sums of money around give him a sense of power and pleasure rivaled by nothing else. He spends his scant personal time being patronizing to his adorably well-bred girlfriend (self-obsessed Kelch ignores her work-life) and sparring with his rivals/friends at the office, while trying to keep as much space as possible between himself and his mother and sister in Rockford, Illinois. In his childhood, Kelch’s single mother struggled financially. Now, his sister’s husband works at a plant, and in reaction Kelch money-grubs. Generally, the narrator relies on mean cultural stereotypes more than character development: there’s an uptight Asian guy and an arrogant Jew, while the author somehow imagines that Kelch’s midwestern roots make him intrinsically nice despite his apparent lack of heart. Out one night, Kelch meets an erstwhile novelist-cum-journalist, and, to impress his girlfriend, agrees to meet the writer later. Well, after Kelch tells all over a few beers, his ordinary life (Kafka with cash) is blown out of the water when the mousy journalist/novelist writes a vicious and brilliant exposé about “Scott” and his job (though the harsh/heartfelt article may provide the book’s best pages). Horrified, Kelch is certain everyone knows. Indeed, his long-dormant dad calls about the piece, and it seems Kelch’s arrogant, well-educated assistant is gunning for his job. Grim. Paycheck-driven Kelch does some agonized introspection and begins to Plan for Life After Freshler Feld, but there are some surprises in store for Kelch at story’s end.
Readers will get a mildly informative look at the money-drenched world of finance but may be hard-pressed to finish this otherwise sluggish tale.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6778-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
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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