Another success, combining genuine psychological depth with humor and irony.
Acerbic wit and pathos distinguish Medoff’s accomplished second novel (after Hunger Point, 1997).
The story begins with Janey’s exciting and slightly clandestine affair with her officemate, the perfect Tobias. The two are actuaries in a large New York firm, and it’s perhaps the seriousness of the profession that draws such an upper-class Adonis to the mousy, bespeckled Jane. Or more accurately, as she soon finds out, he’s just using her for a little afternoon delight. He humiliates her in public with this revelation, and so begins Janey’s walking (and stalking) neurosis. She enters group therapy to help get over Tobias, and here the fun starts. She wants to flee at first introduction to the “girls,” all either past or nearing 40: Laura, a bona fide nymphomaniac; Valentine, a compulsive overeater; Natasha, terrified of germs; Ivy, addicted to plastic surgery; Suzanna, excessively devoted to her lap dog Ginger; and Bethany, dis-inclined to be nice. Of course, what the group doesn’t know about quiet Janey is that she’s haunted by her mother’s “disappearance” and keeps a detailed list of suicide options in her purse. The girls eventually bond (during after-therapy sessions at TGI Fiday’s) and dedicate themselves to collectively solving each other’s problems. The solution often would be a well-meted-out revenge, but no matter the ethics, the girls are feeling stronger and more confident as the days go by. The climax of their vengeful pursuits ends with a cracked skull on a boardroom table and the realization that it may not be the men in their lives who are the problem, but the women themselves. All fun aside, Medoff beautifully balances the women’s diverting quirkiness with Janey’s own sincere struggle in choosing life over death.
Another success, combining genuine psychological depth with humor and irony.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621269-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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