Deftly beguiling sequel to a Gen-X soap opera (Our Noise, 1995) about the misadventures of the Virginia bar band Bottlecap. Beginning where Our Noise left off, Mark, Gary, and Steve have ditched their hometown manager, jilted their girlfriends, and burned every bridge they can to take an all-expense-paid trip to Los Angeles, where they plan to record their first CD for Subterfuge Records, a trendy ``alternative'' label now owned by a giant Japanese entertainment conglomerate. While bassist Gary and drummer Steve pillage the mini-bar of their way-cool Mondrian Hotel suite, guitarist Mark naively signs a deal memo with weirdly blue-eyed Henry James, a record company executive who then announces that, after listening to a tape of Bottlecap's earlier songs, he doesn't ``hear a single'' that radio stations would want to play. Wondering if he hasn't made a deal with a devil, Mark bumps into Corrine, a film studio production assistant, who seems to enjoy him for reasons that have nothing to do with his affluent parents or the music he plays. While moving into a condo owned by Subterfuge, Steve meets Sam, an unemployed actor and drug dealer whose neurotic friendship will ultimately doom the band. Meanwhile, Gary, envious of Mark's success with women, finds salvation in doing his laundry. The collision between Bottlecap's artistic pretensions and the record company's commercial interest is no surprise, but Gomez inventively dodges every clichÇ: His Hollywood settings find depth in the very fact of so much shallowness, and his clueless slackers find far more than they deserve as they traipse down the boulevard of broken dreams. A gentle, broadly appealing tale of fumbling love and slick betrayal from a writer who's been there, done that, and still has plenty to say.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83194-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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