A frightening fable about the watcher and the watched.
Roemer's debut offers a disquieting take on Rear Window set in contemporary San Francisco.
Our narrator is a workaholic book publisher who lives, post–marital breakup, in a beautiful but stripped apartment on a placid hillside. He rarely ventures out, subsisting on delivery-service food and on the human contact provided by video calls with authors and collaborators. All day he stares out from his command post near the five high windows of the title, observing the people who come and go and—the panopticon works both ways, it turns out—being observed by them. There are sinister undertones everywhere. The novel opens as the narrator observes a nearby house fire, one in a series of them. He hears mysterious muffled explosions from across the street; his upstairs neighbor shows up bloodied, pleads for the publisher to call 911, then departs with his lover, who has, the neighbor says, injured himself in a wood-carving accident; a transit hub is about to be built nearby, and the community is tense, wary, angry. Then an international celebrity author, not the kind this small outfit publishes, submits a novel manuscript that features eerie parallels to the publisher's situation. All the while the reader has to grapple, too, with questions about the narrator's reliability—why do his neighbors seem to think he's a malignant presence, this watcher who doesn't hide behind the usual niceties (and window treatments)? Like Hitchcock, Roemer excels at establishing and then deepening the reader/viewer's unease—but his interest is less in the plot complications that fuel Hitchcock's film than in the psychological drama unfolding within the apartment as the publisher's life implodes. Roemer's achievement here is to discomfit the reader without sacrificing the story's fundamental realism. This book reads, often, like a dystopian novel, but—disturbingly—it's one set in a dystopia we already live in.
A frightening fable about the watcher and the watched.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945814-94-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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