Makes you long for a no-nonsense nonfiction version of the events.
Clueless first novel about the worst accident in Amtrak’s history.
In September 1993, a passenger train crossing a bridge over a bayou outside Mobile, Alabama, was derailed at night in thick fog, after a towboat and barges had knocked the bridge out of alignment; 42 passengers and five crew were killed. The author follows the train from its start in Los Angeles, but he also jumps forward frequently to 1998. Five years after the disaster, two men are still struggling to make sense of it. One is W.C. Odell, the towboat pilot; the other is Tommy Pedersen, ex-fireman. W.C. haunts the novel. Though apparently blameless, he has surrendered his pilot’s license and left his family to live hermit-like in the woods. Tommy, a rescue diver that dreadful night, is just as scarred; he too has left his job and family. Formichella entangles these two stories with those of Willie, W.C.’s grandson, and Michael Rogers, school truant officer, who gets more attention than either of the haunted men—and shouldn’t. The author’s touch isn’t any surer when it comes to the passengers. Foremost among them are Douglas, a handsome blond med-school graduate, and Christine, an innocent young computer scientist mulling over her first lesbian experience (on a different train). Maybe they’d have been a sleeping-car item if Douglas hadn’t been distracted by an ancient hypochondriac, one of Houston’s grande dames. Others on the train are barely introduced before their rendezvous with destiny. Formichella is a railroad buff, seemingly more comfortable with railroad lore than with the vagaries of human behavior; railroad history even intrudes into his lovers’ conversations between the sheets. He also flubs his account of the crash, splitting it into two sections, so that the story of Tommy’s rescue attempts are far removed from the fuller version, where Douglas dies in (yup) a heroic attempt to save Christine.
Makes you long for a no-nonsense nonfiction version of the events.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-67-2
Page Count: 266
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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