An intriguing but ultimately baffling rumination on looming adulthood.
A young graduate meditates on his future and agonizes over his absent girlfriend during a long hot summer in St. Louis.
Debut novelist Beachy finds his voice but loses his narrative in the ethereal Midwestern landscape of this coming-of-age fable. The novel is narrated by Potter Mays, a character who falls somewhere between Charles Webb’s Ben Braddock and John Updike’s Rabbit Anstrom on the maturity scale and shares many of their tentative propensities. After graduating from college, Potter returns to his childhood home in suburban Missouri to lick his wounds. After he cheated on his girlfriend Audrey with a disposable blonde, and she cheated on him with a “dirty hippie,” Potter’s first love has left for an extended tour of Europe with bisexual beauty Carmel, posting cryptic notes and mementos for our tortured host. Back in the ’burbs, Potter makes a pretense at normality with a menial job delivering water and falls back into the comfortable routines of life among his parents and the transitional misadventures that arise among stranded high-school friends. The advice delivered onto the oddly detached Potter ranges from ironic (“What happens is you get to a point where you have to let the past go,” says Potter’s father, confessing his impending divorce) to bitingly straightforward (“Be a grown-up for once, Potter,” says best friend Stuart Hurst, having sold his advice to his amigo as an “Independent Thought Contractor”). Beachy’s perception of the doldrums of young adulthood are sound enough but his affected literary style often falls flat, especially when Potter bends so often to navel-gazing inaction. “But what of the aberrations? We half-mirror sons, smudged, foreign. These deviations from values. We who survived only to tarnish the men we admire. We failures, broken models,” muses Potter during one memorable aside at a Cardinals game. Potter makes for an interesting deviant but not a very lucid one.
An intriguing but ultimately baffling rumination on looming adulthood.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34185-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
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
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