Sixty years after the classic Call It Sleep, Roth, quite astoundingly, is back inside the consciousness of a Jewish immigrant boy in New York before WW 1—continuing, though with differences, the Joycean rodeo of consciousness that that first book began. Nine-year-old Ira Stigman—the boy-protagonist here—and his parents have just moved from the shtetl-like security of the Lower East Side to "white" Harlem. The bonds of culture are weaker uptown—few Jewish friends, no religious studies—and the insecurity is echoed by the larger world's threats, such as the war (Ira's uncle is drafted, sent off to fight in Europe with a great chorus of sidewalk lamentation—a fine scene that also reminds us how ancient a distaste unmodern Judaism has for soldiering). Ira, though, is more preoccupied with defending himself against Irish bully-boys and the slippery tactics of an upscale grocery store as it makes an arrangement with Prohibition; with fending off various pederastic moves (including one by his teacher) and with his own burgeoning sexuality (mortifyingly, unwillingly, come to focus upon his own mother). In a prose that is formal but warm, Roth tells Ira's tale in a shapely, controlled manner that benefits from the slight aloofness of memory trolling in the depths of very long ago. Interrupting all this are asides addressed to the author's computer ("Ecclesias"). But in these—though they are often touching, the whitened confessions of an old man and long-blocked writer—Roth consciously dilutes what spell he might have spun from Ira's story. A kind of double-entry bookkeeping, the contemporary musings of the octogenarian unavoidably call forth a pathos that the Ira-narrative wants to keep well away. And so the emotional temperature of the whole work falls out of whack—with spots too warm, spots too cold: never quite a steady climate. Still, Roth's return is a genuine event—and Call It Sleep devotees will find it unthinkable not to see what it's all about.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0312119291
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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