For the Alters, life has been a seemingly endless series of tragedies; for us, the tragedy is that this stunning novel...
Three middle-aged sisters collaborating on a memoir that's meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell's masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching.
Together, Lady, Vee and Delph Alter have decided that New Year's Eve, 1999—the cusp of the new millennium—will be the day they end their lives, quietly and with as little melodrama as possible. But first, they have embarked upon writing this “whatever-it-is—this memoir, this family history, this quasi-confessional.” It will record the saga of the last four generations of Alters (theirs included). Also, it will double as their joint suicide note. (“Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note? A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.”) Suicide seems to run in the Alter family, and now it has reached the current generation: Vee, the middle sister—whose beloved husband was murdered getting lunch one day at Chock full o’Nuts—has cancer, with six months to a year left. If one sister goes, they’re all going. And so begins their project, which traces the Alter family history, starting with their maternal great-grandmother, brilliant and stifled, and great-grandfather, the German-Jewish Nobel Prize–winning chemist who invented the gas that would ultimately be used in the Nazi death chambers. “He was the sinner who doomed us all,” they write, the root of the ill-fated family tree. She died (a gun in the garden); he followed suit (morphine). With variations, the subsequent generations did the same. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, from Germany to the Upper West Side, Mitchell’s (The Last Day of the War, 2004) dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy (but mostly agony) with deep empathy and profound wit.
For the Alters, life has been a seemingly endless series of tragedies; for us, the tragedy is that this stunning novel inevitably comes to an end.Pub Date: March 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-235588-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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