At times overly controlled, but rich in emotional density.
The evolution of a Las Vegas family over the course of three summers, as marked by the adolescent daughter’s job as a lifeguard.
Constructed a little too neatly in three acts, almost as if emotions go on hiatus during the nine months between summers, Skyler’s debut opens with a season of sexual awakening. When she begins her lifeguard job at the Dunes Hotel, 15-year-old Helen has recently acquired her first boyfriend. Leo, from a financially struggling family shattered by divorce, is drawn to the stability of Helen’s educated, upper-class world. His appeal to her seems largely physical, and soon they’re having sex. Meanwhile, Helen’s mother Kathy, a third-grade teacher who feels stifled by her own marriage to buttoned-down ULV history professor Edward, begins an unlikely affair with earthy Dunes pool manager Gerard. The second summer finds mother and daughter embroiled in their individual sexual complications and ensuing moral dilemmas. Confused by the extreme swing of her feelings toward Leo, Helen almost elopes with him yet drifts into casual sex with another lifeguard. She witnesses her mother’s increasingly heated affair with Gerard, although Kathy denies it when confronted. By the third summer’s denouement, Gerard asks Kathy to choose between him and Edward, who suffers in patient silence. Helen is about to head off to college, and Leo is beginning to have realistic dreams of his own; they finally acknowledge that they have no future together. Other things end as well: Gerard dies of a heart attack, and the Dunes Hotel is imploded. Despite her tendency toward unnecessary literary allusion, Skyler sensitively explores family dynamics, particularly the line between privacy and secrecy. Even better is the pathos she brings to her portraits of Leo and Edward, supporting players who steal the show.
At times overly controlled, but rich in emotional density.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05870-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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