Lightweight, but the author’s fans will find this an agreeable rest from the dark, deep fictions on which Harrison’s...
Rambling tale from Harrison (Returning to Earth, 2006, etc.) of a Michigan farmer, dumped by his wife after 38 years, who decides to visit all 48 states in the continental United States.
Cliff only makes it to 16 states—unsurprisingly, since our amiable narrator is easily distracted and not very firm of purpose. He went to college and became a high-school English teacher to escape the “family fate” of tilling the land, but fell right back into farming after wife Vivian’s father died. When Vivian, embarked on an adulterous affair, sells their 200-acre farm, Cliff uncomplainingly pockets his meager share of the proceeds and hits the road. As he crosses into each new state, he shares with us its official nickname, bird, flower and motto…when he doesn’t forget. He’s somewhat preoccupied by Marybelle, a former student who comes along for the ride from Minnesota to Montana. They’re having fabulous sex en route, but Cliff begins to tire of Marybelle, especially when she’s talking endlessly on her cell phone. Harrison wrings a good deal of wry comedy from 60-year-old Cliff’s discovery that “given more than enough sex you see that it isn’t the be all and end all,” and from Marybelle’s endless quest for decent reception. Also fairly funny are conversations with son Bob, a gay movie-location scout who’s always telling Cliff how clueless he is and who seems to enjoy talking to Marybelle more than to his father. Both agree with Vivian that Cliff is meandering through life and needs to pull himself together. But readers will probably enjoy the rambling travelogue Cliff provides in lieu of getting a grip. He’s an engaging narrator: curmudgeonly about cell phones, Republicans and Marybelle’s psychobabble, enthusiastic about nature and food, and basically loads nicer than any other character. What exactly the point of this story might be is hard to say, especially when Cliff winds up back in Michigan and (maybe) back with Vivian.
Lightweight, but the author’s fans will find this an agreeable rest from the dark, deep fictions on which Harrison’s reputation properly rests.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1863-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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