A grimmer Carl Hiaasen, without the Florida sunshine.
A 40-year-old slacker in suburban Fargo suspects his formerly fat wife is cheating on him.
Chain-smoker Dennis Pratt, intellectually overqualified for his toxic-waste disposal job, dreads deeply the looming Mexican resort vacation his hardworking wife, Patricia, insisted on as a celebration of the 20th year of their dismal marriage. Pratt can’t swim, fears water deeper than the bathtub, has no wish to loll in a gated playground for gringos and wants even less to play the mandated golf with the male halves of the couples who will be sharing their vacation digs. Since there’s no getting out of it, though, he’s been putting away on one of greater Fargo’s less-exclusive golf clubs (some of the funnier scenes here) and even subjecting himself to the terror of wading lessons. Compounding the stress in his wretched life is the dawning suspicion that the reason Patricia has completely thrown over her lifelong red-meat, high-carb diet for tofu and mineral water, shedding the fat she has carried all their married life, is that she is having an affair. Prime suspect is the town’s leading dentist, Dr. Carver, an old schoolmate and friend of Pratt’s who ran off and joined the Marines when their English teacher inexplicably chose the semi-nerdy Pratt for a fling rather than the smitten Carver. He’s also haunted by five missing cans of mercury he agreed to dispose of for a ghostly visitor, which he has in turn fobbed off on a very unbalanced trailer-dweller whose miserable daughter Pratt befriended. Pratt’s only comforts are the brusque affection of his daughter, now going through a lesbian phase at the state university, and the friendship of an attractive painter who steers him toward medical relief of his world-class anxieties. And Mexico keeps getting closer.
A grimmer Carl Hiaasen, without the Florida sunshine.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-58243-342-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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