Ron Grant, one of the "Chosen" i.e. beautiful people, a successful playwright, is down in Jamaica taking up skin-diving in an attempt to search for his "Manhood." That this is quite a problem for a man of thirty-six will be evident at the beginning When he looks down at the "head of his peepee." Some 685 pages later he solves it, and gets the idea for a new play, when he comes up with a philosophy that to prove his masculinity he needn't take "refuge in bravery" or all those things (war, shark-shooting, hunting) which was certainly part of the mystique of the man he refers to here as "old Hemingway." But old Hemingway was a writer, and Jones, who has been almost unanimously faulted for his sloppy writing, bad grammar, and fatiguing vulgarisms, hasn't learned a thing. This book is closest to Some Came Running, and it relies on the skin games (sex and diving) other people play for whatever interest it has. The story itself revolves around Grant who has had a fourteen year affair with a castrating older woman (a reminiscently real foster-mother, muse, shrike, patroness) and now his transfer to Lucky Videndi, a high-class hooker—"a reserved sexuality oozed from her like her very own invisible honey." Well, it's not too reserved, and while Ron marries her, he suspects that she has spent a night with a local diver, Jim Grointon (uh huh) while she faults him for his relationship with her predecessor, who is also down there, etc. etc. A lot of time here is spent in the deep waters where Ron is also trying to prove himself but for the most part the arena is the bed, where, for one thing, Ron's manhood is never in question.... Since this book is the first of three on what is now the most legendary contract in the industry, the market too is subsidized. Q-ueue up.
Pub Date: April 10, 1967
ISBN: 1453218475
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967
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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