Well-intentioned: pulp with a cause.
A Cinderella makeover, a noble cause, and likable people don’t quite rescue an amateurish debut.
Beginning with a beating and ending in triumph, Ruth’s metamorphosis from battered wife to a successful African-American businesswoman is predictable yet undeniably sympathetic. Now in her mid-30s, Ruth can barely remember a life without abuse. After her mother’s early death, Grandmother Johnson tyrannizes poor Ruthie, and then at 18 she marries the older, commanding Eric. After more than a decade of domestic violence, Ruth finally can take no more. Throwing Eric out of the house (and her life) lands her in the hospital, where she meets her first guardian angel. Clara, an older woman who runs a women’s shelter, becomes Ruth’s lifeline to the world and eventually a surrogate mother. Ruth divorces Eric, moves into a cozy condo, and buys new furniture in a first attempt to create a life of her own choosing. Guardian angel number two is girlfriend Bernie, a workmate who becomes Ruth’s first real best friend. She then meets the perky May in the park, and this guardian angel works on Ruth’s weight problem, image problem, and man problem. Ruth joins May in her stringent exercise program and eventually begins to shed her physical and emotional baggage—but more importantly, May sets her up with the scrumptious Adrian. A beautiful, proud black man, Adrian offers something she’s never known before: a loving and supportive relationship. Ruth takes it slowly but can’t deny that Adrian may be The One. She goes back to school, helps organize a fund raiser for Clara’s shelter, toys with the idea of starting a business—then abruptly Ruth’s fairy tale ends when Eric begins to stalk her and Adrian leaves the state to be with his baby’s mama. Ruth finally does get a happy ending on her own terms, but not before yet another trial by fire.
Well-intentioned: pulp with a cause.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30989-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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