Smith's 11th work of fiction (The Devil's Dream, 1992, etc.) is a straightforward, amiable narrative of Christian faith and redemption—a cautionary tale of innocence, disbelief, debauchery, and witness. Florida Grace Shepherd's wide-eyed confession begins on the fringes of Christianity. Her itinerant preacher father is an illiterate follower of that old-time religion who demonstrates his faith by handling snakes, drinking poison, and listening to the voices that guide him. When the family sets up in Scrabble Creek, North Carolina, young Grace secretly enjoys some of the modern amenities of 1950's life, even though her Daddy continues to live by ``signs and wonders'' in a world wholly determined by Divine Providence. The family's austere life is just one more test of faith, shattered only by an older son's dissent: he insists on taking his young brother to a hospital. One by one, Grace's siblings also break away when into their lives slithers Lamar, who can ``sniff out the bad'' in the 14-year-old girl. Even her father, meanwhile, for all his self-righteousness and sense of election, is rumored to backslide on the road, and his churchly antics bring down the law. And Lamar seems to have enjoyed all the Shepherd women, including Grace's long-suffering mother, whose torment leads to suicide. Eventually, Grace and her Daddy hit the road, but no one now supports the notorious preacher and he takes up with booze and floozies. Grace marries Travis Word, a kind and honest preacher more than twice her age, but their loveless marriage results in her adultery and decline; grandmother at 38, she finally reconciles herself to her long dormant faith while wandering through a Christian-themed miniature-golf course. Though Virgil Shepherd descends from Hazel Motes, there's none of Flannery O'Connor's biting humor here: Smith treats her characters with more sympathy than theological vigor, which makes for a heartrending book.
Pub Date: May 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14050-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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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