An absorbing, engaging, and finely crafted novel about the abortion debate.
Orbach (Transgressions and Other Stories, 2013) weaves a story focused on a young doctor, two women in his life, and an abortion clinic in this socially minded volume.
“It was still only the beginning of our lives,” observes Jenna early in the novel as she and her fellow residents at a Boston hospital gather to celebrate one of their birthdays. This is before Jenna’s teenage sister gets pregnant; before her friend Phil—whose commitment to helping women is described as “almost pathological”—opens a women’s health clinic in upstate New York. One of the women he helps is Adele, who comes to rely on Phil following the deaths of her parents in an accident. She tries to be supportive of Phil’s career choices, though she worries about their ramifications. Jenna, who has long harbored unrequited feelings for Phil, returns from a year in Africa to assist at the clinic, but her emotional baggage —both familial and romantic—colors her ability to function dispassionately. Set against the culture wars of the early 1990s, when anti-abortion activism often turned violent, the stories of Jenna, Phil, and Adele intersect to illustrate the difficulty of holding on to ideals in a clinical environment and a cynical world. (At one point, Phil recalls: “People ask me sometimes why I made such a point of wanting to do abortions and maybe start a clinic—and then, later, why any of us kept on, even though it meant living in a combat zone.”) Orbach is a tremendous writer, her voice effortless and her sentences as smooth as a morphine drip. She is always attuned to her characters’ feelings, even as they try to hide their emotions. Here Jenna hears from Phil that he and Adele are having a baby: “The room seemed to tilt, as if I might be spilled back into the snowy street. ‘God bless,’ I said after a moment. It would never change, then.” The issues surrounding the abortion debate are ever present, yet the book’s tone is never preachy: histrionics are for activists, while Orbach’s doctors are (almost) always focused on the task at hand. It is this dichotomy between passion and calm—between saying something and talking yourself out of it—that frames the story’s central conflict, challenging readers to feel more than they’re normally comfortable doing.
An absorbing, engaging, and finely crafted novel about the abortion debate.Pub Date: May 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5889-2
Page Count: 322
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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