A sweetly pleasing though scarcely satisfying narrative.
Canadian den Hartog’s first novel comes after the American publication of her second (The Perpetual Ending, p. 8) and is again about independent sisters and their pretty but vapid mother bereft of husband.
In lovely if lightweight prose, den Hartog introduces Hannah and Vivian in their own voices as they make their way back to their small hometown three hours from Ottawa. It’s the eve of their mother Darlene’s second marriage to the local shoe-store owner. Long-haired and eternally youthful, Darlene provides a kind of cotton-candy center to the family’s thread of earnest anecdotes, beginning with first husband Mick’s having walked out when the girls were nearly adolescent. A free spirit and lover of nature, Mick was sorely missed by his two daughters and their mother, who never quite got over his departure, though her chronic philandering couldn’t bring him back, either. Still, now, living close by are Darlene’s sister, Angie, solicitous and often spitefully envious, and her ethereal only daughter Wren, born with webbed feet. Den Hartog works by long-winded flashbacks, pursuing over the years the growing into womanhood of the two sisters who are never quite right for the town and can’t wait to leave. Along the way are Darlene’s intermittent new boyfriends (fleshy scientist Uncle Tim, for example, whom the girls hate) and Mick’s untimely death, while Wren, considered a kind of freak, tries to find friendship in the Brownies. Finally, Darlene’s wedding day arrives, signaled by a switch to the present tense, though the stream-of-consciousness remains constant—as if Vivian and Hannah had never grown up and experienced a life of their own. If the point of the story is to get at the reason behind Darlene and Mick’s breakup, it’s a flimsy teaser. While there’s considerable detail throughout, den Hartog’s tidy prose and fleeting surfaces don’t let the reader glean a visceral sense of these characters’ lives.
A sweetly pleasing though scarcely satisfying narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-61-3
Page Count: 270
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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