Read this book for the vivid imagery and sharp dialogue. Read it for the spot-on characterizations. But if you want to care...
A well-written tale of family dysfunction that’s sure to depress the reader from beginning to end.
Narrator Mark Barr doesn’t much like his family and hasn’t been back to Alma, West Virginia, for more than a decade. Then his oldest brother, Steve, dies of a heart attack at age 45. Mark returns to find his father as hateful as ever, his mother as weak and unpleasant, and his other brother, Greg, as disagreeable. The family plans no funeral, no memorial for Steve, who is said to have been mentally ill. So what to do about Steve’s remains: urn or grave? That is the plot. Steve had begged Mark, “Don’t forget me, bro,” and simply wanted to be buried next to Grandpa Roy. But Dad, who has contempt for his entire family, insists on cremation and on placing the ashes in an unmarked urn to remain inside the house. The issue becomes a battle of wills between Mark and Dad, with Mom and Greg largely on the sidelines. Vivid descriptions help set the mood and redeem the story: “Baloney-pink rugs spread across bulges in the tile.” “Steve—bloated, grungy, and depressed in life—would look his best dead, too.” Mark’s life away from “home” has been no prize, either. He and his girlfriend are not in love but seem too lazy to break up, even though he has struck her at least once. The fundamental problem with the book is that there is no one to sympathize with, barring Steve, who’s dead. Mark and his old man both need swift kicks in the butt, but Mom won’t do it. Greg has a lawnmower and a huge truck tire in his kitchen, though, so there’s that going for him.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62288-078-2
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Stephen F. Austin State University Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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