A small gem, written in a lilting southern conversational voice, with an afterword by Gibbons.
A quirky, charismatic, often lyrical second novel (A False Sense of Well Being, 2001), posthumously published; novelist Kaye Gibbons completed the book after her friend’s death, in 2003.
Katy Doyal narrates this tale from the afterlife, from the other side of air, where she is now “hovering about in a state of something like perpetual titillation,” waiting for her husband Ephraim to die and join her. But until then, she has arranged for his upkeep and living, in the form of brassy, intuitive Rose Callahan. That Rose moves into the Doyal’s substantial house without question or complaint, despite having never met Ephraim, is handled with a little bit of humor and a lot of make-believe. Bits of magic envelop the study of Katy and Ephraim’s long relationship, which we learn about through Katy’s words and the long letters of advice Katy’s mother wrote (now being read by Rose so she can better learn Ephraim’s ways). The two met as eight-year-olds (Ephraim digging in the mud, Katy imparting some bossy girlish wisdom) and remained hopelessly romantic through their poverty and then the sudden financial windfall that graced their later years. Their impenetrable union helps to explain the churlishness of their only child, Wyatt. An angry fellow, always feeling like the butt of a private joke, Wyatt has come to Georgia with wife Ann, who will leave him unless he can become a decent person. A tall order, but if he just listens to his mother’s whispered advice, clearer now to him than when she was alive, he may finally grow up and make amends with his father. Braselton’s triumph is in taking a few days and filling them with authentic conversations about anger and love, and creating not something stiffly earnest or maudlin, but a novel that is bright and true.
A small gem, written in a lilting southern conversational voice, with an afterword by Gibbons.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-44310-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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