A family saga about the grotesque underbelly of wealth.
Mendelsohn (American Music, 2010, etc.) tracks the slow and gruesome fall of an elite New York family caught up in the darker side of capitalism.
“All families are complicated,” Mendelsohn writes, “but because their connections constitute the primary reality that its members know, some families create a world that to them is more comprehensible than the world itself.” So it is with the Zanes, less a family than a dynasty, a self-contained empire unto themselves. But while the family pivots on Steve, real estate mogul and family patriarch, the novel swirls around the two young women dearest to him: his 17-year-old adopted daughter, orphaned after his beloved sister’s death, and the family nanny, a woman defined by her strength and haunted by her past. Poppy is a sylphlike beauty, precocious and lost; Neva is an outsider, a Russian woman sold into sex slavery as a child, now Steve’s unlikely confidante. On the surface, the two are opposites—Poppy is defined by her privilege, Neva by her lack of it—but, as the novel barrels toward its tragic conclusion, their lives overlap in unexpected ways. Extreme wealth is built on the backs of extreme exploitation, the novel argues, whether the people doing the exploiting know it or not. While the dark and twisting plot is heavy on brooding intrigue (international sex trafficking, incest), the book is sharpest when it’s dealing with more quotidian concerns (disappointment, aging). For all that they’re the focus of the book, Neva and Poppy—complicated as they are—never quite transcend their beautiful, heartbreaking types. Instead, the book gets its emotional heft from its supporting cast: Steve’s older daughter, Alix, unfulfilled and bitterly approaching middle age, may not be the heart of the novel, but she is its soul.
A family saga about the grotesque underbelly of wealth.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87545-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
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