The phony happy ending mars what is for the most part a cringingly funny satire of love and money among the artsy class.
From the opening scene in which an earthquake shakes Los Angeles, Brown’s tart second novel (All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, 2008), about a pair of hip Californians facing financial and marital collapse, couldn’t be more timely.
Rising filmmaker Claudia and indie rock star Jeremy married and bought their 1,300-square-foot bungalow for $600,000 during the height of the housing bubble. With a big movie contract pending for Claudia and an album deal in the works for Jeremy, the couple plans to be out from under the increasingly steep interest-only mortgage payments soon. Unfortunately, after a film Claudia’s written and directed tanks at the box office, her new contract dries up while Jeremy’s band dissolves before finishing an album. Moreover, Jeremy has not paid the mortgage for several months and now the bank won’t renegotiate the loan. As the possibility of losing the house looms, cracks appear in the marriage. Responsible, hardworking Claudia’s more conventional side emerges; desperate to keep the house, she takes a job teaching film at a private high school. Jeremy, who works fitfully as a T-shirt designer and takes pride in his bohemianism, which borders on irresponsibility, was already chafing at the demands of the house when the mortgage crisis arose. Before he met Claudia, he had been a music/art world darling in New York, the lover and muse of a now world-famous artist named Aoki. One of her paintings of him hangs in the bungalow, and he refuses Claudia’s request to sell it despite the needed cash it would bring. Instead they take in a tenant who sets the house on fire. By then Aoki, emotionally unstable but still alluring, has shown up to tempt Jeremy away from his marriage. A desperate Claudia is engaging in her own moral capitulation—falsifying a student’s grades to get a lucrative film deal from the girl’s father.
The phony happy ending mars what is for the most part a cringingly funny satire of love and money among the artsy class.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52403-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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