On the bland side, but Saul manages to insinuate a clean, edgy ending: overall, a debut with enormous depth of...
Ponderous, quietly affecting debut takes a single father’s grief over his son’s suicide to surprising turns.
At first plunge, there isn’t much to recommend this slow-going melodrama. Indiana college professor Jack Owens was too absorbed by end-of-semester grading of his students’ films to notice any problems with his son and only child—but then came the grim news of 15-year-old Danny’s suicide. The boy’s body was found down by the Wabash River in May, apparently by bag suffocation. Jack is racked by guilt, since his wife, and Danny’s mother, Anne, abandoned the family many years before, vanishing back into her life as a New York artist, unable to balance her roles as painter and mother. Jack and his son subsequently made a kind of pact that if father and son did their best, and made their sacrifices, nothing bad could happen to them. For Jack, sacrifice meant breaking up with a woman he cared for so that Danny wouldn’t be “confused.” Now, after the seemingly senseless suicide, Jack grows dejected and dangerously depressed, but eventually opens up to the kindly detective in the case, Marty Foulk, who reveals the details of another apparent suicide some months before, that of a ten-year-old boy. Jack has little to go by except the testimony of Danny’s friends, who hint at psychological distress two weeks before Danny’s death—just around the time the other suicide took place. Journalist and TV writer Saul moves with excruciating slowness in delineating Jack’s grief, almost unbearably so, inserting along the way memories of happier times, when the family was united and living a bohemian life in the East Village; Anne’s selfish desertion of the family now seems the fatal cruel blow—and yet Jack must endure more grief than he can imagine.
On the bland side, but Saul manages to insinuate a clean, edgy ending: overall, a debut with enormous depth of characterization and sympathy.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074752-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
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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