Such thoughts are roused by a tiny new little book, a mere slip of a thing, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, from Kurt...
If, in modern times, melody could disappear from music and recognizable image from art, is it possible that the novel can also, at long last, grow free of its imprisoning burden of “story”?
As far back as 1927, E.M. Forster wished for that very thing, lamenting in Aspects of the Novel that “Yes- oh, dear, yes – the novel tells a story…[And] I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different – melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form.” It may be that all true art struggles against the confines of its own medium – and the more intense the struggle, the greater the art. In fiction, the escape from “story” goes back at least to Laurence Sterne, with his hilarious blank pages in Tristram Shandy. And there was of course Gertrude Stein, who carried the effort about as far as possible, while Virginia Woolf strove valiantly in the name of truth against the fossilizings of tale. In our own time the “story-novel” has pretty clearly run out of steam, functioning no longer as art at all but, high-brow or low-, as a form of entertainment (or infotainment) entirely content within its old shoe of a medium. And yet maybe, as a result, something new is afoot – the stirrings again of the anti-novel. There’ve already been the “experimental” novels of, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet or the late Natalie Sarraute. But those, all art and no play, have grown dusty and are gone. So consider just a few recent treasures from current rebels against the old “he said, she said” novel – Julia Blackburn’s The Book of Color; Gordon Lish’s Arcade or How to Write a Novel; Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String; Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque; David Markson’s Reader’s Block. Little known? Little sold? Little recognized? Ah, yes, but their day may come.
Such thoughts are roused by a tiny new little book, a mere slip of a thing, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, from Kurt Vonnegut, that great and resilient writer who more than any other has labored to pierce the rusty armor of “story,” coming up with book after book of wit, depth, hilarity, profundity, grace, and sorrow. This little one is no exception, but you’d better grab it – it’s so very tiny – before it disappears altogether. Like, maybe, the novel.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2000
ISBN: 1-58322-020-8
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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