Bleak and believable.
Writer-producer Ridley (Everybody Smokes in Hell, 1999, etc.) takes a somber look at the life of an African-American comedian in a country not quite ready for him.
Ridley has also done stand-up, so even though there are no laughs in this wise, restrained, and thoroughly detailed story of an almost-made-it, the backstage feel is authentic. Jackie Mann is the son of a domestic whose death, in the midst of the Depression, leaves him in the care of a defeated, addicted, and brutal father in Harlem. Jackie is no athlete and no tough guy, needing the protection of his friend Li’l Mo just to survive on the playground, but early on he discovers the power of humor to get himself out of situations and even to be admired. That ability proves useful when he and Li’l Mo hire on as lumberjacks in Washington State for a summer, where they’re surrounded by scary rednecks and where he has his first taste of an audience in an amateur show. Skipping college, which he couldn’t have afforded anyway, with no connections and only a modicum of nerve, Jackie sets out as a comedian, trying out material on a few postmidnight customers at a 14th Street burlesque house. There, he also befriends Fran Kligman, an aspiring singer, and hooks up with Sid Kindler, a small-time agent who believes Jackie has the stuff for a career. He also has his first sight of the love of his life, the beautiful young singer who will go on to become the Motown star Tammi Terrell. Tammi is only one of Mann’s real-life characters—Frank Sinatra, Vic Damone, Mort Sahl, and especially Sammy Davis Jr. all have roles, and Jackie Mann’s determination to appear on the Ed Sullivan further places the story squarely in its time. Jackie almost makes it to the top, but it’s a cruel trip that costs far too much.
Bleak and believable.Pub Date: June 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-446-52836-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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