Totally charming whacked-out politics.
Two likable misfits are brought together by the Bush administration’s dastardly use of national education tests.
Chicago native McNally (The Book of Ralph, 2004) weaves the lives of Iowa grad student (film studies, alas) Charlie Wolf, whose sexually ravenous Russian girlfriend has left him for an Indian doctor, and Burbank, Ill., high-school dropout Jainey O’Sullivan, pierced and piebald. Jainey’s father went to prison for bashing out the brains of Jainey’s gym teacher (justifiably), her mother lives to smoke and her brother lives in the attic, simmering in white Christian rage. Jainey’s highly amusing essay in a No Child Left Behind test has brought her to the attention of mopey Charlie, who, not about to be hired as a film scholar, was mysteriously recruited to work for the national testing service in Iowa City. Afraid that Jainey may be suicidal and having nothing to keep him in Iowa, Charlie arranges a transfer to Chicago, taking a room in the ultragrim Pompeii Inn and working as a security guard in the massive central test-storage facility. Jainey is not suicidal, but she has benefited from the suicide of her beloved art teacher, who has bequeathed her the contents of her condo, including her masterwork, a bigger-than-life Osama bin Laden scarecrow that, when partially disassembled, becomes a George Bush scarecrow. Charlie isn’t the only one keeping an eye on Jainey. One of Charlie’s odd co-workers from Iowa City is on the scene, and Jainey’s father has been sprung from the pen. When they at last meet, Charlie and Jainey have to wonder whether the government has it in for them the way it seems to have had it in for the late art teacher.
Totally charming whacked-out politics.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5626-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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