After the ambitious dark-comedy of Somebody's Darling and the satiric sprawl of Cadillac Jack, McMurtry returns here to the affectionate, life-sized, gently biting portraiture of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show. Harmony is a veteran Las Vegas showgirl, toplessly approaching age 39, long-separated from shrimpy husband Ross, recently involved with crass Denny. . . who has just stolen her long-awaited $1300 insurance check. ("In the love area she didn't have such great brakes. . . . The sadness of men, once it got into their eyes, affected her a lot, she sort of couldn't bear it and would usually try and make it go away if the circumstances permitted her to. . . .") But Harmony's biggest problem, whether she fully knows it or not, is her cold-hearted teenage daughter Pepper—who's even more beautiful than Harmony, who loathes Harmony's clothes ("Every single blouse you've got is tacky"), who drips scorn on her optimistic, emotional, sentimental mother. And the novel's small arc of action is the inevitable see-sawing of these two lives—Pepper going up, Harmony on the way down. For dance-student Pepper, there's an audition at the casino where Harmony works, impressing even nasty boss Bonventre ("if you worked for him your body was his to condemn"); there's also the kinky courtship of super-rich, 45-ish Mel—a proud voyeur who pays grand sums to photograph Pepper in antique lingerie and proposes marriage. For Harmony, on the other hand, there's best-friend Jessie's ankle-shattering fall during a show ("'For Christ's sake, she only fell six or eight feet, will you stop making it into an Ann-Margret situation?' Bonventre said, he sort of looked bored"); there's a grim date with ex-Marine Dave, a mercenary-magazine aficionado who shares his beloved K rations, even opening three different kinds ("For him it was a big deal, sort of like taking her to a fancy restaurant or something"); and, predictably, there's the numbing shock of getting fired from the casino—though all these traumas will push Harmony into a gallant stab at reconciliation with Ross, now bald and more potato-faced than ever. (But "he still had the soft little Kansas voice, plus best of all Ross still had the sweet eyes.") True, McMurtry's folksy narration occasionally gets a bit mannered—with flaky digressions, the paragraph-long sentence runons, the recurrent "sort of." And, however endearing, Harmony never quite breaks out of the familiar dumb/sweet/gallant mold. But Pepper is a formidably unsentimental creation, the supporting cast is lovably eccentric (Harmony's housemates include goats, peacocks, and garage-sale-maven Myrtle)—and, even if not every deep, this is an ingratiating closeup of wounded-yet-cheerful souls, steadily alive with modest insights and low-key humor.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1983
ISBN: 0684853841
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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