Blunt and bold: the work of one of America’s best writers.
Smiley nails the Greed Decade with her trademark precision and philosophical bite.
In 1982, narrator Joe Stratford is a divorced 40-year-old realtor in a part of New Jersey just beginning the transition from provincial backwater to upscale suburb. He’s a disappointment to his religious parents but “the elected son” of slightly shady developer Gordon Baldwin, whose married daughter Felicity forthrightly entices Joe into a lighthearted affair that turns serious. Into this comfortable existence blows Marcus Burns, an IRS agent turned “investment counselor” who solves Gordon’s tax problems with a phone call and immediately starts spinning grandiose plans to make big bucks developing the 580-acre estate of a wealthy elderly couple. “This is the eighties,” Marcus tells a skeptical Joe. “Experience doesn’t count anymore.” Marcus’s schemes get ever bigger, financed without a murmur by Portsmouth Savings, whose aggressive new president aims to swell its revenues by taking advantage of S&L deregulation, and Marcus’s sister Jane arrives to lure more capital with her knowledge of “all the new investment instruments.” It’s utterly clear that Marcus is a con man, but Smiley (Horse Heaven, 2000, etc.) expertly conveys his appeal to people quietly bored with their constricted lives. “When someone like Marcus Burns comes around, it makes you realize how local you are,” remarks Gordon’s ne’er-do-well younger son, one of the many characters drawn with Smiley’s customary incisiveness. Marcus is the most compelling, despicable yet oddly vulnerable, tapping spookily into other people’s personal longings. As Joe is drawn into his scams, the author unsparingly but with considerable empathy depicts the complicity of a decent guy doing questionable things that give him an alluring sense of freedom and power. Was Marcus manipulating Joe all along? Or did he mean it when he said, “you’re about the only friend I’ve ever had” and just couldn’t help himself? Joe has to live with the fact that he’ll never know, just as he has to live with the consequences of his actions in a novel that, like A Thousand Acres (1991), acknowledges both the seductiveness of excess and the necessity of limits.
Blunt and bold: the work of one of America’s best writers.Pub Date: April 28, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41217-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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