A forceful story not helped by its choppy style, while the self-absorbed heroine grates.
Sexual healing: from the author of Resurrecting Mingus (2001).
Photographer Selah Wells does nude studies of Afro-Cuban drummers, inspired by the raw sensuality of their music. She’s always been amazed by the power of sex, starting back when she charged neighborhood boys a quarter each to touch her budding breasts. No way she was going to stay innocent for long, not even with Mama Gene, her grandmother, forever quoting that damn Bible. But Mama Gene had a secret of her own: her addiction to prescription pills, which she hid all over the house, even in the toilet tank, where wino husband Frank found them. Selah just can’t deal with all this hypocrisy and shit when she’s got important stuff to do like strut around in hot pants and disco shirts. Grow up? That’s for suckas. Her rape at 13 by boyfriend Tonio and his friend is just another blow that can’t keep her down for long. Love, bad and good, gets her through. Now, years later, her husband Parker has caught her in bed with another man, and things just hafta change. Selah is bored with married sex, bruised by life, and generally disillusioned. Seems like Parker’s religious devotion is another barrier to her self-realization, and she’s angry because he won’t understand that. Little by little, in somewhat confusing flashbacks, Selah reveals the emotional aftermath of an abortion she had at 19. Afraid of motherhood, and of her grandmother’s censure, Selah nonetheless named the fetus and imagined a life for the little girl she secretly wanted to have. Until she comes to terms with all of this, she can never reconcile the warring parts of her self and soul. Parker stands by her, helping out with a ritual burning of letters Selah wrote to her unborn daughter as they reconcile at long last.
A forceful story not helped by its choppy style, while the self-absorbed heroine grates.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-87353-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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