An unsparing examination of the turbulent depths beneath an unsuspecting hero’s most unexceptionable-seeming fantasies, and...
Compared to most of Harrison’s heroes, Dr. William Moreland is statistically normal. But that doesn’t protect him from the floodtide of psychosexual anguish that washes over them all.
Although he’s a successful New York psychoanalyst with a perfect daughter—his son Luke died three years ago in a boating accident—Will Moreland lives in the shadow of the twin brother he hasn’t seen in 15 years. Mitch Moreland looks just like Will except for a wine mark that covers half his face, but he’s a champion long-distance swimmer, and when Will goes to his 25th college reunion, it’s Mitch that everybody asks about. Will has a suddenly burning question of his own for Elizabeth, a college ex-lover who now heads the burn unit at Johns Hopkins: Was Jennifer, the daughter she was pregnant with when she broke up with Will and abruptly married someone else, actually Will’s? Elizabeth reacts coldly, and Will, after a few months of his normal routine of fantasizing about every one of his female patients and actual coitus with Carole, the wife who ever since Luke’s death will only let him approach her from behind, writes her an apology and a promise not to pursue the question. He doesn’t know that it’s already pursuing him in a form he can’t imagine or control, and that it won’t stop until all the certainties of his life and his faith in himself have been shattered. The material shouts TV Movie of the Week—well, maybe not a network movie—but Harrison’s (The Seal Wife, 2002, etc.) measured, matter-of-fact prose gives each perverse twist of her pulpish plot a nasty kick, taking readers into the heart of Will’s deep sadness and out the other side.
An unsparing examination of the turbulent depths beneath an unsuspecting hero’s most unexceptionable-seeming fantasies, and a life patently too normal to be true.Pub Date: July 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6346-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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