A likable if uneven tale of discovering yourself in old age.
From Maloy (A Stone Bridge North: Reflections on a New Life, 2002), an earnest novel about a septuagenarian finding a second life after the death of her husband.
Sarah and Charles are enjoying old age. Things aren’t implausibly perfect—Sarah has a contentious relationship with daughter Charlotte, and Charles can’t connect with son David—but they have a rich life in their native Vermont, with friends and fulfilling pursuits. The first third of the story follows Sarah and Charles as they conduct daily business, with Sarah reminiscing about their long and mostly happy marriage. This may sound like dull stuff, but this is the best of the novel, a striking portrait of a marriage that is as imperfect and amiable as its participants. Then one day Charles has an accident while hiking, and dies shortly thereafter from his injuries. Sarah mourns but soon her new, entirely unplanned life begins. Mordechai (her friend’s Israeli cousin) moves into a small cabin on her property to write his book. Then teenage granddaughter Lottie moves in because she simply can’t bear another day with her parents. After that, Sarah allows a few of Lottie’s friends, similarly rebelling, to live in the large house too. It vaguely reminds Sarah of her Depression childhood home, peopled with her extended family, a poor but companionable bunch. Then Sandy and her five-year-old, Tyler, move in (their trailer burned down) and then Josie, who ran away from her abusive husband with her infant son. Sarah’s son David quips that his childhood home has been turned into a commune, and there is certainly that feeling of camaraderie among the unlikely roommates. Sarah takes up photography and meditation and attempts to mend her relationship with Charlotte before it’s too late. Though the latter half of the novel is filled with people and their various stories, its heart is back at the beginning with Sarah and Charles. All that follows feels a bit predictable.
A likable if uneven tale of discovering yourself in old age.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-56512-541-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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