Foos's satire is never quite on target—and never much more than clever.
An ambitious first novel that uses heavy-handed satire to illuminate current issues of sexual difference, reproduction, and media-hype.
When 30-ish Rita, long married to George, realizes that she's lost her uterus while buying shoes at the mall, she blames ``her ambivalent feelings about having children.'' But her efforts to get the uterus back provoke extraordinary events: George can't make love to her anymore, because the ``thought of the womb out in the world somewhere so cold and lifeless kills his erection every time''; her ad asking for help attracts a group of militant feminists, The Fruitless Wombs, who get her on the popular Nodderman TV show; and her appearance on Nodderman not only tremendously affects the women in the audience but so upsets one of them, Adele, that she finds her vagina has ``closed up shop''—and her boyfriend's efforts to reopen it with his carpentry tools only result in his injuring himself. As the media hype continues, demands for the red-heeled shoes Rita wore on the Nodderman Show lead to a run on red shoes, as well as growing foot fetishism, and men's increased erotic awareness of the uterus. The frenzy reaches its height when another woman, Lucy, begins menstruating in sympathy—and can't stop, though her flowing blood kills her dog. When Rita and Adele hear of this while appearing together on the Nodderman Show, they flee, hole up in a motel, and tell each other childbirth horror stories. Finally, though, a suicide by a hemophiliac who'd tied a plastic uterus round his neck makes Rita realize that ``she has a responsibility to put an end to the suffering on her behalf,'' and the women return to make new lives for themselves. Despite the graphic, sometimes grotesque descriptions and frenetically energetic writing,
Foos's satire is never quite on target—and never much more than clever.Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56689-030-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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