Elliptical, unsettling and strangely fascinating.
A New Jersey gallery owner accompanies a traveling salesman on an impressionistic, campy circumnavigation of the South in Sher’s follow-up to Gentlemen of Space (2003).
Milton Menger is a strange man who speaks in double negatives, digressing frequently on art, metaphysics, dreams and history. His decision to come to the aid of Singer Sewing Company representative Charley Trembleman, an ex-painter whose hands have been burned in a motel fire, isn’t purely altruistic; Menger is fleeing his estranged wife and a personal darkness that lurks in the margins of his narrative. The pair stop off in sewing-machine stores, small-town bars, art museums and seedy motels. They encounter oracles and sirens: an old man who divines Civil War artifacts with his metal detector, a sexy but sinister fellow Singer Sewing Company agent who pursues them across the South. Terrible things happen to the people around Menger, but he remains clinical, obsessed with the specters of a Civil War–era painter and the Singer Company’s founder, Isaac Singer. Menger is hyperaware that mass production and its mechanisms (sewing machines, guns, automobiles) have forever changed the world; he is haunted by hidden patterns and metaphors. The narrative’s appeal lies in its characters’ obsessions, phobias and omissions; Menger and Trembleman are fugitives from change who seek refuge in transitory places and in lofty conversations conducted along forgotten miles of Southern highway. After a terrible accident brings to surface their sociopathic tendencies, they become wanted men on a hallucinatory, nightmarish flight that circles cruelly back on its origin. Much as Menger tries to avoid the truth, through art and through his tendency to collect others’ experience at the expense of his own, he will ultimately come face-to-face with his own, incontrovertible essence. Character is destiny and destiny is unavoidable. By the lights of sewing machines and motel fires, on the screens of unplugged televisions that display mysterious shows, Menger begins to discern the truth behind his own elaborately constructed mythology and the arsonist’s secret identity.
Elliptical, unsettling and strangely fascinating.Pub Date: March 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101413-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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