Bennie tells us more about his night and his life than most would ever want to learn.
A novel that captures the tedium of being stuck overnight in an airport can’t help but become a little tedious in the process.
The debut by magazine journalist Miles begins as a rant of complaint, evolves into an existential fable and threatens to become the world’s longest suicide note. Ostensibly written by protagonist Bennie Ford, a former poet turned translator, the book makes for a long read, almost as long as the night Bennie spends at O’Hare Airport while trying to fly from his home in New York to his daughter’s wedding in Los Angeles. He begins by demanding a refund from the airline, and perhaps an explanation, yet the bulk of the letter finds Bennie doing the explaining. In a series of flashbacks that crisscross all over chronology, he explains his mother’s dementia and her troubled marriage to his late father. He explains how he has had no contact with his daughter for some 20 years, until an invitation arrived for her wedding. Actually, for her “commitment ceremony,” for he hadn’t known until then that she is a lesbian. He explains the circumstances leading to her conception, after he began a relationship with another poet whose attitude toward life—and toward Bennie—became far more pragmatic in the wake of motherhood. He explains his brief marriage (his only one, since he had never married his daughter’s mother) and what a mistake it was. He explains his alcoholism, going into great detail over incidents at the bar where he worked and drank. Perhaps it’s only coincidence that the air carrier he addresses throughout the book shares initials with the organization that helped him stop drinking, because many of these stories could have been told at an AA meeting. Finally, he intersperses the account of his life with his translation of a novel with some thematic parallels.
Bennie tells us more about his night and his life than most would ever want to learn.Pub Date: June 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-547-05401-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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