Sinks beneath the weight of its good intentions.
An allusive if uncompelling first novel records a young African-American’s passage to manhood in a small Texas town.
Protagonist and narrator Moose O’Malley is an admirable sort, a serious young man who wants to be a scientist, but like many authors who set their novels in a historical era (here, it’s the 1920s), Mitchell feels obliged to authenticate her hero’s personal drama with topical references to real events and real people. The result is information overload, both slowing and distracting. Moose, whose full name is Theodore Roosevelt Bullmoose O’Malley (his mother was a great admirer of the former president), begins his story, told as a succession of vignettes, with recollections of pranks played in grade school by Barnett, his very young step-uncle and classmate. We learn that Moose’s cowboy father died when he was eight, and that the boy now lives with his mother, Barnett, and Uncle Will, his step-grandfather, on the south side of Knox Plains, the only land the white folks permit blacks to own. In a leisurely fashion, Moose introduces locals, among them the unmarried Nesbet sisters; the uppity Gibley family; and Mrs. Pendergast, who runs the local hotel. Knox Plains is poor, and life is hard—until oil is discovered there, much to the whites’ chagrin. Moose helps out at the family store and records all the changes in the community that follow. Young women from New Orleans seduce the gullible newly rich young men, one of whom is murdered. Someone shoots the recently married Seck Nesbet, and his much younger wife decamps with family money, leaving his sisters destitute. On a visit to Kansas, Moose falls for beautiful Betsy Singer, the sister of a lawyer, but thinks she’s unattainable, especially after the Crash of 1929 swallows up the money his mother set aside for college. But love and financial help are at hand, as an old friend doesn’t forget past kindnesses.
Sinks beneath the weight of its good intentions.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87081-608-X
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Univ. Press of Colorado
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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