Beautifully written and powerfully compassionate: more fine work from a modern master.
The anxious aftermath of World War II and the turbulent confusion of the late 1960s provide the dual settings for Lent’s latest exploration of the American psyche (A Slant of Light, 2015, etc.).
Katey Snow is just 17 when she takes off from her home in Vermont, headed for Virginia on an odyssey set in motion by a stunning family revelation. Its precise nature slowly becomes clear as Katey’s journey crosscuts with the history of her parents’ marriage, shadowed by Oliver Snow’s traumatic experiences as a soldier in Germany. Lent, a quietly bold writer who rarely takes the expected path, makes this novel as much about mothers and daughters as about men and war. Jo Hale tries to warn daughter Ruth that dreamy, melancholic Oliver is unlikely to come back whole, and her warnings are borne out by the postwar silences that fester between the couple even though they love each other. And the disclosure that unmoored Katey was the culmination of years of sniping between her and Ruth, for whom her daughter incarnates the forces of unruly change threatening to shatter her world’s precarious equilibrium. Katey, for her part, views Ruth as “a tired bitter woman with a wasted life,” a cruel adolescent observation belied by Lent’s delicate portrait of the complicated realities of Ruth’s and Oliver’s lives, both sustained and constrained by their close-knit families and their small-town society. As usual, Lent brings his fictional world alive in brilliant physical detail: thickly textured descriptions of the fiddle-playing that consoles Oliver, of Ruth’s cooking, and of the varied landscapes through which Katey drives. The Vietnam-era background is slightly more rote than Lent’s perfect rendering of 1940s America (getting over the Good War by not actually talking about it), and Katey is a somewhat less interesting character than her parents. But the interplay between their stories makes for a heartbreaking examination of the fraught bonds of kinship and community.
Beautifully written and powerfully compassionate: more fine work from a modern master.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62040-499-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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