Returning to the themes of her 1993 Strange Angels—with a detour through the badlands of Russell Banks—Agee offers a rambling saga that includes an abuse-riddled Nebraska family, a hideous crime, a slow path to redemption, and the love of a good woman. Our first sight of hellion Ty Bonte is in court, where he’s being fined for another wild night gone wrong. Ty is troubled but basically good: he just has a lot of monkeys on his back. His father works him like a slave on their Sandhills ranch; his mother, having moved back to town long ago and found religion, treats him like a stranger; he still blames himself for his younger brother’s death in a tractor accident; and then there’s Harney Rivers, the banker’s son and Ty’s ever-ready partner in transgression. Harney is beyond wild, and the extent of his savagery soon surfaces when he and Ty get drunk and decide to get their kicks from a pair of drunken hitchhiking Indians. Flash forward more than 20 years: Ty is living in Kansas with his own spread, trading horses and making ends meet. One day he picks up a thoroughbred he’s not supposed to have, taking it and the woman who misled him, by name Dakota, back to his place. Ty and Dakota begin to fall in love, but trouble in the form of Harney, older but no less savage, follows; he kills the horse for the insurance and runs Ty through with a pitchfork. Barely recovering, Ty decides it’s time to settle with all that’s unresolved in his past. He heads back with Dakota—who’s decided to stand by her man—to the Sandhills, where he finds his father dying; a warrant still outstanding for his own arrest after the night of beating the Indians; and Harney waiting for him. Riveting scenes of ranch life and the grimly glorious Nebraska countryside can’t overcome a plot both bloated and sluggish, with a fairy-tale end painful to read.
Pub Date: July 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88233-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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