The ecstatic closing pages will strike some as over-the-top, but sensitively developed characters and gorgeous prose will...
Another intense exploration of family ties, doomed love and existential questing from talented, risk-taking Lent (Lost Nation, 2001, etc.).
Investigating a campfire in the woods behind his Vermont home, 43-year-old Hewitt Pearce finds spaced-out Jessica Kress, clearly under severe mental and emotional strain. Hewitt can empathize; he’s still brooding obsessively over Emily Soren, who walked out on him more than 20 years ago. Hewitt, who’s built a solid career as a high-art blacksmith (his forge bears a sign warning clients, “YOUR COMMISSION IS NOT MY VISION”), has frustrated several girlfriends, who have learned that they can’t compete with Emily’s memory. When Hewitt reads that Emily’s husband has died in a car crash, he races to see his lost love, who shuts her door in his face. Yet soon Emily is phoning—mostly to scream at him, but her diatribes provide new insights into why the teenaged lovers fell apart. Meanwhile, Hewitt and the considerably younger Jessica are forming what seems to be a father-daughter bond. She eventually reveals that she has a family link to the tragic early life of Hewitt’s father, a famous painter who lost his young wife and baby daughter in a fire but went on to make a new life with Hewitt’s mother. As always, Lent writes compellingly of people untangling their pasts and striving to elucidate their connection to the world as well as each other. Some of the best scenes show Hewitt reaching a new understanding of his powerful mother and estranged sister. His relationship with Emily is more problematic; she initially appears so self-absorbed and self-righteous that readers may wonder what Hewitt ever saw in her. Jessica, by contrast, is rendered in idealized, slightly schematic terms as a fragile visionary healed by immersion in the natural rhythms of Hewitt’s Vermont community.
The ecstatic closing pages will strike some as over-the-top, but sensitively developed characters and gorgeous prose will keep most admirers of serious American fiction engaged in this moving, though flawed novel.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-87113-965-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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