A polished but unpersuasive first novel about a teenager coming to grips with her family and her pregnancy. Sophie Behr’s narrative of 16 crucial months in her young life features spare, elegantly crafted prose and improbably knowing insights. The story begins in April of Sophie’s tenth-grade year: Her brother and cousin are fighting in Vietnam, and other topical references pinpoint the time as the mid-1960s. But life on a Wyoming sheep ranch moves to eternal seasonal rhythms, and Sophie and her mother are locked in the ageless parent-child battle for control. Willy Chastain Behr converted to fundamentalist Christianity several years back, long after Sophie’s father abandoned her, but she’s still mentally unstable and drinking hard. The supporting cast includes Demetrio, the sheepherder who impregnated Sophie; PiratÇ, a sadistic ranch hand; Edwina, a rebellious transplant from Detroit whose friendship with Sophie strikes the book’s one psychologically truthful note; and, eventually, Sophie’s wandering father, who pauses long enough in Colorado for his daughter to visit and learn the shocking secret that drove him from Willy. Like the other acts of violence here (several directed against helpless animals), this revelation attempts to extort an emotional response from the reader that the characters have not succeeded in eliciting. The climactic events—Willy’s descent into catatonia, Demetrio’s departure because Sophie can’t say she loves him—also seem like arbitrary developments imposed by the author rather than natural outgrowths of the material. Though a recent interview mentions her real-life experiences on a sheep ranch, the overly studied, airless quality of Marchlands makes it a prime example of Writing School Lit. Kuban, a recent Pushcart-winner, provides some lovely descriptions of the western landscape; it’s too bad her characters aren’t equally vivid.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83165-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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