Odd pastiche of elegy and parody: an intelligent and at times genuinely moving story that seems afraid to take itself...
A sharp if somewhat aimless account of an artistic young woman who takes a job as a Wall Street speechwriter to pay for her husband’s medical bills.
Australian writer Jennings (Snake, not reviewed), New York–based, writes in the voice of Cath, a freelance writer who is by her own admission an unreconstructed 1960s leftie, committed to all the usual causes (civil rights, abortion, socialism, feminism, free love) and opposed to greed, rapacity, and hierarchies of privilege. So how did she end up on Wall Street as an executive speechwriter at Niedecker Benecke, “a firm whose ethic was borrowed in equal parts from the Marines, the CIA, and Las Vegas”? For the money, of course—the only raison d’etre you’ll ever find at Niedecker Benecke. Cath’s husband Bailey is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, and Cath needs money (lots of it) for his treatment and care. Bailey is 25 years older than Cath to begin with, and his sudden descent into senility has made him even more distant from her than the age gap alone. The job of writing glowing accounts of corporate greed has provided her with enough alienation to keep her in therapy for decades, but it has its moments: Some of Cath’s colleagues, for example, are just as out of place on Wall Street as she is. Mike, for example, was an SDS protester at Columbia in 1968, and Horace’s sexual tastes could best be described as polymorphic. Her dreadful boss Hannibal (as in Lecter) even provides some unintentional amusement now and again, but most of the office scenes are quickly upstaged by the drama of Bailey’s decline and fall—an account of real pathos that sits ill-at-ease with the sarcastic portrait of corporate venality.
Odd pastiche of elegy and parody: an intelligent and at times genuinely moving story that seems afraid to take itself seriously.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-00-714108-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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