The Disinherited was probably written earlier than Fixer Chao, and is in no way its equal.
A Chinese Filipino leaves life in America and tries to come to terms with his Manila family’s ill-gotten wealth.
Prizewinning playwright Ong’s rangy successor to his critically praised debut (Fixer Chao, 2000) is a rather more diffuse book, despite its consistent focus on a strongly imagined central character. He’s 40-ish Roger Caracera, a Columbia University writing teacher, whom we meet as he’s bringing home for burial the body of his father Jesus, a notoriously corrupt sugar baron. Roger suffers silently through a lavish funeral tribute stage-managed by his paternal Aunt Irene, a privileged matron who wears their family’s wealth like a glossy second skin. And when Jesus’s will unaccountably (and unbelievably) leaves half a million dollars to Roger, the guilty “prodigal” undertakes to make restitution for his father’s rape of their homeland’s resources—for example, “doling out financial reparations to the descendants of the Caracera cane cutters.” But Roger’s charity is repeatedly refused or manipulated—by a formerly idealistic Peace Corps worker who has insulated herself with creature comforts; a “Missionary woman” unwilling to challenge the Catholic Church’s ban on birth control; a teenaged tennis brat who lavishes contempt on all who try to help him; and 15-year-old gay hustler Pitik (a.k.a. “Blueboy”), an ingenuous romantic who wants his benefactor’s love even more than the latter’s money. The story leapfrogs thus among numerous incidents and viewpoints, coming to a muted conclusion with Roger’s second return to Manila for a meeting with his mother Teresa, a vibrant beauty who had lost her soul to the Carcaeras’ duplicitousness and has languished for decades in an insane asylum. It’s an oddly unsatisfying climax to what ought to have been a riveting tale but instead separates out into unstructured, flickering fragments.
The Disinherited was probably written earlier than Fixer Chao, and is in no way its equal.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-28075-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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