Pleasant people in a pleasant setting, but without the credibility and edge to engage.
Cronin’s graceful second (after Mary and O’Neil, 2001) is well executed but uncompelling as it tells of the hold a lakeside Maine camp has on three generations of a family.
The characters are as good as their intentions, and the evils that intrude are the impersonal plagues of war and disease. Everyone is forgiving, loving, and sensitive, even Harry Wainwright, a paragon of corporate responsibility, whose living and dying ties the people and the story together. Things begin as Joe Crosby, badly wounded in WWII, buys a camp in Maine in 1947 and moves there with wife Amy and baby Joe. Nearly five decades later, it’s summer, and Joe junior’s wife Lucy and their daughter Kate, a medical student, as well as guide Jordan, are awaiting the arrival of the dying Harry. Harry has cancer but is determined to go fishing at a place that has long been a treasured refuge. Jordan, Joe, Lucy, Kate, and Harry record this last visit while also revisiting their respective pasts. Joe and Lucy have just sold the camp to Harry, who has a surprising but perfect new owner in mind. Harry has played an even more significant role in the Crosbys’ lives. During Vietnam, Joe fled to Canada, and Lucy, his high-school sweetheart, helped the ailing Joe Senior run the camp. One year, a grieving Harry, whose wife has just died, arrived to spend the summer and found comfort in helping Joe and Lucy. Lucy, who’d dreamed of marrying young Joe, found herself drawn to the much older Harry, as he was to her: an attraction that had consequences when Joe returned to marry her. But the secrets and attractions have no corrosive power, and Harry is more a benevolent godfather with time on his hands than he was as a busy tycoon. Even as he lies dying, he continues to give generously and behave thoughtfully.
Pleasant people in a pleasant setting, but without the credibility and edge to engage.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33581-4
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
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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