Strongly plotted, crowded with full-bodied characters and as thoughtful about “this national hysteria over college...
Gripping portrait of a woman in crisis from the extremely gifted Korelitz (The White Rose, 2005, etc.).
Portia Nathan should be happy. She’s proud of her work as an admissions officer at formerly country-clubbish Princeton, now a bastion of multiethnic excellence thanks to the dedication of Portia and her colleagues to finding the very brightest of all races and classes. OK, her relationship with her aging New Lefty mother Susannah is distant, and she’s hardly more intimate with longtime live-in boyfriend Mark, chair of Princeton’s English department. Maybe that’s why, during a recruiting trip in New England, Portia falls into bed with John, who teaches at the ultra-alternative Quest School. Portia is startled but impressed by Quest’s think-outside-the-box students, especially Jeremiah, a brilliant autodidact she thinks belongs at Princeton. But when John tells Portia (who didn’t recognize him) that he knew her as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, it’s the first in a series of unsettling events that unravel her carefully controlled life. Susannah has taken in a pregnant teenager; Mark confesses that he’s knocked up a fellow professor and moves out. Poring over hundreds of application folders, faced with her annual task of “winnowing the stupendously remarkable from a vast field of the only normally remarkable,” Portia slowly comes unglued. By now, we know that she got pregnant in college, and whatever choice she made about it has shadowed her ever since. It seems for a while that the narrative might lead us toward a tearful mother-and-child reunion, but Korelitz demands far more from her lovable heroine. Portia comes to understand that her wounds are partly self-inflicted, and she demonstrates her commitment to change with a brave, rule-breaking act she knows will be punished. It is, but we believe Portia will pick up the pieces because we’ve seen that she’s ready to take some of the care she’s always lavished on anxious college applicants and devote it to herself.
Strongly plotted, crowded with full-bodied characters and as thoughtful about “this national hysteria over college admissions” as it is about the protagonist’s complex personality—a fine, moving example of traditional realistic fiction.Pub Date: April 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54070-4
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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