With no likable characters, its difficult to know who to root for, which makes the stream of parties, car rides and hotel...
A bleak portrait of a group of young Las Vegas natives—the author’s debut.
Growing up the son of a single mother who worked nights in the casino, Chase always thought he would be the one to escape Vegas. For a while, he does, matriculating at NYU, where he meets his go-getter girlfriend, Julia. But something draws him back. After finishing college at UNLV, Chase is now half-heartedly teaching high-school art by day, and by night cavorting with childhood friends Bailey, Hunter and Michele, who have been involved since high school in a high-stakes prostitution ring. After a rumble with a student, Chase loses his teaching gig and plunges further into their world, which is especially dangerous when Julia comes to town for a business-school conference and gets a feel for Chase’s world. Chase feels particularly protective of the beautiful Michele, and acting as her driver seems to have less to do with the money and more with keeping an eye on her. This is understandable, particularly given Chase’s flashbacks to their high-school years, when the foursome had another member—Chase’s troubled sister Carly. Carly’s demise (from a drug overdose) was also Chase’s, and it is guilt that keeps him from the success he might have otherwise had. But this doesn’t account for his acceptance of Michele’s fate, or his inertia when he sees two of his own former students sucked into the same web of trouble. And though Julia has stuck with Chase through countless personal crises, an unexpected pregnancy finally forces the issue and makes Chase see that Las Vegas is his home, and despite all the trouble it brings him, he doesn’t want to leave.
With no likable characters, its difficult to know who to root for, which makes the stream of parties, car rides and hotel rooms seem nearly endless.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7042-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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