Is this Irving’s worst novel? No doubt about it. Will it sell gazillions of copies nevertheless? Absolutely.
The life of an actor is compromised and traumatized by his many relationships with older women, in Irving’s sprawling—in fact, overstuffed—11th novel.
Jack Burns’s earliest years are spent in his native Canada and points east, such as Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Edinburgh (where his father, church organist William Burns, had seduced and abandoned Jack’s mother Alice, a tattoo artist). We learn a lot about the tattooer’s art, and the occupations, avocations and fetishes of the (mostly female) people Jack encounters over the years, accompanying Alice’s pursuit of William (who keeps moving), then as a student at St. Hilda’s School for Girls, where he bonds uneasily with Emma Oastler, a preadolescent free spirit who’s the first of her gender to take a protective interest in Jack’s nubile penis. Jack moves on himself, to fledgling fame as a schoolboy actor, then to Exeter Academy and the University of New Hampshire (allowing Irving to recycle autobiographical material previously fictionalized elsewhere), a Hollywood career and an Oscar for writing a screenplay based on old pal Emma’s best-selling novel, increasing his distance from Alice (who’s found other outlets for her affections), and—after nearly 700 pages of repetitive, self-indulgent twaddle—a search for father William, who’s in a Zurich sanatorium, afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, covered with tattoo images comprising “both a history of music and a personal history.” Until I Find You aims for plaintiveness too late, having settled, over far too many pages, for arbitrary freakishness exacerbated by what seem extraordinarily blasé dramatizations of the sexual abuse of children, for seriocomic purposes. Yes, we understand it’s supposed to be eccentrically amusing. It isn’t. And there are so many—uh, limp penis jokes that the reader begins to feel as if he’s watching a particularly inane episode of Saturday Night Live.
Is this Irving’s worst novel? No doubt about it. Will it sell gazillions of copies nevertheless? Absolutely.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6383-3
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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