While a summary of Canty’s novel reads like a soap opera, his deft handling of complicated love relationships and...
Canty (Where the Money Went, 2009, etc.) continues to hone his skills in creating nuanced and complex love relationships.
The narrative begins with RL and June’s annual ritual of going down to the river and drinking Johnnie Walker Red to celebrate the birthday of Taylor, RL’s friend and June’s husband, who died 11 years earlier. June, a hospice worker, is about ready to move on and find a new direction for her life, while RL, who owns an outdoors shop, is still not sure what shape his life is in. He’s divorced and has one child, 19-year-old Layla. She’s both a college student and an outdoorswoman, and is finding herself dissatisfied with her current love interest, Daniel, eight years her senior, a graduate student and would-be poet who’s serially unfaithful. More to her liking is Edgar, who works for RL and is an artist manqué. Edgar has a wife and daughter—and another on the way—but he and Layla become seriously involved, and Layla finds herself pregnant with his child. Even these relationships become more convoluted when Betsy, RL’s girlfriend from way back when, needs lodging when she goes in to a local hospital for chemotherapy treatments for cancer. Both cynical and lost, RL takes up with Betsy again and finds himself pulled into a love relationship that involves him at a deeper level than he’d anticipated. Amid the drinking and futility emerge some hints of hope. At the end Edgar has an epiphany arising from the evanescence of a cloud, “a ragged cloud of white against the dark spring sky, a bit of vapor, of nothing, and yet he recognized it: the start of something.” Other characters are able to tap into this same assurance.
While a summary of Canty’s novel reads like a soap opera, his deft handling of complicated love relationships and self-anguish raises the narrative to a more exalted level.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53330-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
