Though Becket laments that he “can’t write a(nother) book that anyone will want to read,” Enger has.
A belated follow-up to a popular debut finds the Midwestern novelist in fine storytelling form, as he spins a picaresque tale of redemption and renewal amid the fading glories of the Old West.
Some readers will undoubtedly find autobiographical implications in the protagonist conjured by Enger (Peace Like a River, 2001). In his second novel, a Minnesota writer who has enjoyed his own out-of-the-blue success with a popular novel struggles in vain to produce a suitable successor. In the opening pages of this first-person narrative, Monte Becket introduces himself as a nothing-special Everyman, a former postman who quit his job after his novel Martin Bligh reached a readership beyond the wildest expectations of both the part-time author and his publisher. Yet Becket has since suffered a crisis of confidence, starting and abandoning seven different manuscripts over a four-year period until he fears that his success was just a fluke. This story has its start in 1915, just as Becket abandons his final manuscript, when a mysterious geezer in a rowboat passes his Minnesota riverfront home (with a nod toward Enger’s earlier novel, rivers run through this one) and ultimately entices Becket to join him on an adventure that will change both of their lives. The mysterious man’s name may or may not be Glendon Hale; he may or may not be an outlaw on the run; and he most certainly is a boat-building alcoholic. With the encouragement of his painter wife, Becket leaves behind a comfortable home and a loving family to accompany Hale on a pilgrimage, one that will find Becket learning more about his companion’s identity while assuming an alias of his own. As they head south toward Mexico and then west to California, they find their travels enlivened by a young accomplice who joins them and a pursuer who trails them, a former Pinkerton detective who has also enjoyed some literary success. Revelations abound, for both Becket and the reader.
Though Becket laments that he “can’t write a(nother) book that anyone will want to read,” Enger has.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-87113-985-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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