An oddly appealing trip down and then out.
Winsome debut novel about a precocious girl’s peripatetic life.
From the perspective of 12-year-old narrator Baby, she and her father, Jules, live a glamorous life in Montreal’s red-light district. Only 15 years older than Baby, Jules conscripts her in his colorful, often fruitless schemes to make a quick buck. Baby knows that Jules is a heroin addict, but when he is high, his love for her is grandly theatrical, their grinding poverty a colorful adventure. But when Jules begins rehab, Baby enters the foster-care system. Deprived of the excitement that took the sting out of her marginal daily existence, Baby clams up, becoming a faithful, if mostly despondent, observer of the small rituals that hold her new families together. Just as she acclimates herself to new companions, she is uprooted, until finally she lands on the doorstep of her newly sober father. Jules, now grimly vigilant about worldly corruption, winds up driving Baby away. She moves in with a pimp and begins turning tricks to support her own heroin habit. After a few wretched months, she finds Jules again, and they plot a new beginning together. The story is a strange mix of heavy plotting and grotesque characters—as if the cast of an Elmore Leonard novel had wandered into a tale by Dickens—but Baby’s voice holds it all together. Baby is the real triumph here; Jules’s charm is utterly believable, but Baby’s yearning for him, even for his cruelties, aches to the bone. Baby believes she is guided by reason and conviction, but O’Neill shows us that Baby is all emotion and instinct. Moving from foster home to foster home, Baby becomes adept at thinking logically and remembering details. This translates into an unselfconscious gift for breathtaking metaphors, perhaps the most mesmerizing aspect of this author’s prose.
An oddly appealing trip down and then out.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-087507-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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