Finally, this effort is sometimes moving or amusing, but also irritating and ultimately disappointing.
As in The World According to Garp, a young man is trying to find his way as he grows up amid institutional, individual, familial, and social craziness in upper New England.
An orphan whose adoptions never stick, Homer Wells keeps returning to the institution in remote St. Cloud's, Maine, that is presided over by its elderly founder, ascetic Dr. Wilbur Larch, committed and expert obstetrician and abortionist (as well as ether addict). Dr. Latch's creed is to give people what they want: an orphan or an abortion. He and his aging female staff count on Homer to grow up to succeed Larch in "the Lord's work" of providing abortions in this pre-World War II world; but while Homer is an accomplished apprentice, his principles are resolutely pro-life. At 20, he leaves the orphanage to live with a wealthy family of coastal apple-growers, whose son and future daughter-in-law are the Golden Delicious variety and become his closest friends. Homer becomes expert at the business, which involves sorting marketable perfect apples from the bruised ones good only for the cider press. But with the apples comes temptation, leading to problems with the rules of love, a not-quite Jules-et-Jim-like solution, and an ultimate crisis that brings the book to a resounding, but awfully pat, resolution. As with Garp, Irving is not afraid of sentiment—and here knows how to stir the emotions in skillful depictions of parental love, unwanted orphans, Alzheimer-stricken adults, and distraught women desperate for a D&C. Even in scenes of appalling horror, Irving can be very funny—he shows obvious indebtedness to Dickens—but there is a less savory element in the way he presents some of his pathetic characters—especially females—as titillating freaks. And the cranking out of the less-than-gripping plot is made palatable largely by episodic situations involving the more vivid minor characters. Most seriously, despite echoes of the clearly "significant" title throughout, it is not at all clear what exactly is the novel's point.
Finally, this effort is sometimes moving or amusing, but also irritating and ultimately disappointing.Pub Date: June 17, 1985
ISBN: 0679603352
Page Count: 571
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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