The first novel in 12 years from the once-notorious author of Last Exit to Brooklyn is an embarrassingly cartoonish amalgam of West Side Story, Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, and—I kid you not—Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It’s the story, told in Selby’s characteristic long, claustrophobic paragraphs filled with unpunctuated run-on sentences, of a young black teenager rescued from the murderous hatred that threatens his own life by a lonely concentration camp survivor. Bobby and his Hispanic girlfriend Maria are savagely beaten by a gang of ’spic muthahfuckahs— and left in the street to die. Maria does not survive, but Bobby is rescued by an elderly widowed handyman, Werner Schultz (who for obscure reasons calls himself “Moishe”), who restores him to health, then tries to dissuade the anguished kid from seeking revenge. As Bobby regains his strength, Moishe gradually reveals the details of his family’s imprisonment, their liberation from the camp and new life in America, and the loss of Moishe’s only son to the Vietnam War. Bobby subsequently tracks down Maria’s murderer, but, at the crucial moment, is unable to kill him. This simplistic novel’s flaws are too numerous for brief summary. Suffice it to say that glaring improbabilities (Moishe’s basement apartment contains, among other wonders, a workout room and Jacuzzi) and unrelenting sentimentality make it impossible to believe in the reality of Selby’s characters, much less feel anything for them. Brief glimpses of Bobby’s fatherless family and Maria’s grieving women relatives are only token attempts to vary a sluggish narrative that resorts to such bathetic effects as a cleansing snowstorm that briefly obliterates the city’s grime and Moishe’s makeshift Christmas celebration, which presumably dries up the last remaining flecks of Bobby’s “righteous” anger. Almost 40 years ago, Selby produced a white-hot vision of America’s mean streets that remains a classic illustration of realistic fiction at its most brutally eloquent. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that he’s fated to be remembered as a one-book wonder.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7145-3024-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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