Mohr’s novel builds slowly, and his empathy for the majority of his characters shines through, allowing for a genuinely felt...
A tragic event on the Golden Gate Bridge brings together a bunch of disparate people, several of whom are reeling from earlier trauma.
After a surreal prelude in which a possibly unhinged character discusses the concept of “existential mathematics,” this novel segues to an event in San Francisco that leaves several people dead. Witnessing this with his father is Jake, a teenager whose recording quickly goes viral. Meanwhile, in Nevada, a young woman named Sara discovers that a sex tape she made with her boyfriend has also been made public. Sara and Jake are among the wounded characters populating Mohr’s novel, many of whom are dealing with the fallout of their actions and the actions of others. Kathleen, a caricaturist, observes early on that “we are defined by our worst features. We are those mistakes.” It’s an observation that both sums up the online world that gradually plays a larger role in the different characters’ movements and describes the situations many in the book are seeking to overcome. Kathleen’s son, Rodney, has difficulty communicating verbally as a result of an accident; it’s a larger-scale version of what nearly everyone present must grapple with over the course of the novel. There’s one morally dubious character in the mix whose story seems less well-developed than the rest; while cloaking him in mystery is understandable, he at times seems more plot device than character, especially in contrast to the more realistically flawed people he shares pages with. Mohr’s portrayal of a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco rings true: a bartender responds to one lament with, “We all ruin the neighborhood when we first come in.” And there’s a fine gag involving Google Glass to boot.
Mohr’s novel builds slowly, and his empathy for the majority of his characters shines through, allowing for a genuinely felt conclusion.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-603-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
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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