A nice diversion, forgettable but fun: it has some great moments but tries to be a little too cute for comfort.
A burnt-out lawyer goes looking for a nun and finds a life instead, thanks to second-novelist Kokoris (The Rich Part of Life, 2000).
Sam Gamett is no Oliver Wendell Holmes: He rarely gets up before noon, and he likes to start his cocktail hour no later than three. When he married the ugly but wealthy daughter of the managing partner of Chicago’s biggest law firm, Sam felt pretty sure he could afford to take life easy. But disaster eventually struck: his wife went on a diet, lost 80 pounds, and dumped Sam overnight. For a while, he made a show of working at a small practice of his own (representing hypochondriacs, malingerers, and exhibitionists), but he was already fed up with the law by the time a disgruntled client burst into his office and tried to shoot him. While recovering, Sam started watching television’s Sister North, a nun who preached and offered advice to callers. And so now, unable to make sense of his own life, Sam jumps into his car and heads for Appleton, Wisconsin, to track down Sister North. When he arrives in Appleton, however, Sam learns that Sister North has disappeared some weeks ago and no one knows when she’ll return. Some say she’s doing mission work in Africa, others that she’s raising money for the mentally retarded in Pennsylvania. Sam cools his heels for a while in Appleton (a kind of open-air asylum for eccentrics on the order of John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces), where he manages to dry himself out, survive a tornado, and fall in love. By the time Sam actually meets Sister North, he doesn’t really need her help. Perhaps he never did.
A nice diversion, forgettable but fun: it has some great moments but tries to be a little too cute for comfort.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-27540-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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