The once reigning champion of redneck fiction continues his decline with yet another one-joke novel, a farce of hippy-cosmic dimensions. Set in a Florida trailer park for retirees (``a warehouse for the nearly dead''), this crude tale focuses on the life and peculiar powers of a white-trash beauty named ``Too Much,'' a girl who grew up with her anarchist granddaddy in the Florida swampland and whose name refers to her ample bust and bottom. ``Full of the curious and the strange,'' Too Much likes to drive the trailer park's owner to horned distraction. Stump, as he's called for his amputated arm, finds himself ``neck deep in kink'' with the young vixen, who clearly uses her wiles to a greater end, what she calls ``the chance of ultimate possibility,'' which comes from ``hope, faith, and the power of imagining the possible.'' Relying both on ``revealed knowledge'' and plain old madness, Too Much turns around the lives of all sorts of old-timers, from the octogenarian couple who can't stand the smell of each other to the ancient lumberjack who finds within himself the strength for one last job. Part of Too Much's plan is a Mayday celebration, complete with maypole and costumes, all intended to bring the ``touch of life'' to the old folks. With the help of a retired carpenter, a former bank president, and an itchy old pickpocket, Too Much takes over the community. Her can-do philosophy often works as shock therapy for the more stodgy residents, but most simply find joy in her exuberance. Stump, meanwhile, drowns himself in booze, waiting for his next session of outrageous sex with Too Much, who dispenses her favors shrewdly. Not unlike what's done in the film Cocoon, Crews (The Mulching of America, 1995, etc.) faces ``age and death and time'' with lots of simple bromides, barely disguised by all his tough-guy posturing and his primitive sexual notions. Lowbrow comedy, not literary wit.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83758-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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