Shakespeare and once-a-decade duststorms fail to make Ordinary Monsters into anything but an ordinary story albeit about...
An alcoholic mother hits the road in search of her disappeared son and finds herself in a strange little California desert oasis: a story that doesn’t quite find itself.
Joyce is having problems, and second-novelist Novak (Five Mile House, 2000) doesn’t hesitate to drop us smack down in the middle of them. At the start, Joyce is in her Saturn, loaded with guilt, purpose, and a shopping bag stuffed full of her life’s savings, and barreling down the road toward New York on a mission to find her teenaged son, who disappeared after getting involved with a dangerous girl who might have been a junkie. In the first hint that this isn’t supposed to be a strictly realistic tale, Joyce picks up a hitchhiker who takes one look at a photo of her son and his girlfriend and says that he thinks he saw them at the Hoodoo Bar and Grill in a California town called Lagrimas. After barely surviving a surreal duststorm, Joyce finds herself at the Hoodoo, where the locals introduce her to an autistic teenager by the name of Danny, who speaks only in Shakespeare quotes and bears a striking—but not exact—resemblance to her son. From here on, the story’s improbabilities and digressions begin to pile up like poorly stacked wood and Novak disperses whatever outer-limits suspense she might have built up in the novel’s striking beginning. New characters keep getting introduced, but none of them—with the possible exception of Duncan, a man with a buried past who’s acting as Duncan’s ward—contributes much to the story. It doesn’t help matters that Lagrimas comes off not as some hidden place on the edge of magical realism, but as a half-baked attempt at quirky localism.
Shakespeare and once-a-decade duststorms fail to make Ordinary Monsters into anything but an ordinary story albeit about extraordinary things.Pub Date: June 5, 2002
ISBN: 1-58234-241-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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