A journey into the dark that’s more titillating then illuminating.
Three brothers share one bed…all their lives.
Clinch’s second novel spans 60 years but begins at the end, in 1990. Vernon, Audie and Creed Proctor are dairy farmers in upstate New York. Old man Audie, mentally challenged, wakes to find Vernon dead but the bed dry (Vernon was a bedwetter). Creed reports the death, which is deemed suspicious. The urine-soaked mattress is impounded. Might Creed have smothered his brother? The police force a dubious confession from the barely literate Creed. Clinch has incorporated some elements of the 1990 Delbert Ward case, just as E.L. Doctorow used the Collyer brothers, the Proctors’ urban counterparts, for his 2009 novel Homer and Langley. Real life supplied a legal resolution in the Ward case. Not so here. Clinch shuffles time periods as he did in his debut Finn (2007), which featured the monstrous Pap. Lester Proctor, the boys’ father, is almost as evil. A mean drunk, he takes the boys on a fishing expedition and almost drowns Vernon through his negligence. Another time he has Vernon cut off his damaged finger. He regrets he hasn’t killed Audie, the “idiot child.” Facing such brutality, it’s no wonder the boys huddle together protectively. Lester dies young in a mule-and-wagon accident; their beloved mother dies of cancer; little sister Donna gets out fast. The brothers keep the farm going, quaint figures from an earlier time. But don’t get misty-eyed; they’re caked in dung and smell terrible. Clinch uses various voices and viewpoints for his group portrait. The brothers are seen as ants, Okies or cavemen (but never kings). Walking a fine line, not wanting us to dismiss them as freaks, Clinch uses their neighbor Preston to anchor the novel. A kindly soul, Preston respects their willingness to endure. A secondary story line, involving their nephew Tom, a marijuana grower and dealer, is a mistake, distracting us from the sad riddle of the Proctor boys.
A journey into the dark that’s more titillating then illuminating.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6901-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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