A long-anticipated return that many readers will decide wasn’t worth the wait.
Having kept busy plowing the fields of children’s lit, writer and literary industrialist Frey (My Friend Leonard, 2005, etc.) delivers his first adult book in a decade.
Jay is a callous young man, a 21-year-old expat in Paris who is resisting a mapped-out future in which he’ll be “An obedient cog locked in fucking place forever.” A quarter-century later, he’s locked in place in Los Angeles as a bestselling writer—writers, after all, don’t write about unhappy sea captains these days, not when one of their own ilk is available for dissection—whose agent is 10 years his junior and wears a $5,000 suit. What’s to be preferred, a youth of drug-dealing poverty in the City of Lights or a gilded prison in the City of Angels? Easy: When you factor in a torrid season of love with a hot young model then being a cash-strapped kid is infinitely better. Frey takes his presumed alter ego back and forth across the decades, whining and moping and self-medicating (“I played ball and read books and chased girls and got drunk and snorted cocaine”)—and, in his later years, lamenting roads taken and not taken and wishing he had figured out how to do better by the title character. So far, so good; it’s all the stuff of an Ethan Hawke movie, and there’s not a surprising moment in it. What does surprise, perhaps, are Frey’s spasms of high-toned porn, of which perhaps the most-printable-in-a-family-publication passage is something like this: “We both move toward each other kissing deeply slowly heavily, lips and tongues, her hands are immediately in my pants, I lift her off the ground set her on the sink tear off her thong.” James Joyce it ain’t, and though it’s marginally more literate than E.L. James, it’s nothing the aforementioned Mr. Hawke couldn’t pull off on screen and behind the keyboard.
A long-anticipated return that many readers will decide wasn’t worth the wait.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0144-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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