Nordan (Wolf Whistle, 1993, etc.) boldly goes where his betters (Faulkner, Welty, O'Connor) have gone before. And he holds his own, mixing dark humor, Dixie eccentricity, and old-time redemption. As always, Nordon returns to his Macondo on the Mississippi Delta, Arrow Catcher, Miss., a small southern town where the undertaker recites Shakespeare, good old boys hum Rossini, and the tall tales grow like kudzu. In this off-center, sleepy place, ``loss is important, magic too.'' Which means here that people die, but their souls live on. When two ne'er-do-well out-of-towners are shot dead at William Tell's general store, everyone assumes it's the work of Morgan, the Texas-trained sharpshooter who was raised by the local hoodoo woman. But Louis McNaughton, a fat kid with a comic-book-fueled imagination, saw the real shooter: the none-too- right-in-the-head Hydro Raney, a hypoencephalic boy-man who lives with his loving father at their isolated fishing camp. One night while tending William Tell's store in town, he manages to kill before being killed, but he can't sort out the difference, so further tragedy ensues. All the grief and gore catches the town at a moment when everyone seems to be seeking forgiveness and transformation. The cuckolding Mrs. McNaughton shames herself into sobriety and a resumption of her motherly instincts; the ``Prince of Darkness'' (aka the local undertaker) tries to reconnect with the world after the death of his overbearing mother; and Leonard Reel, a self-loathing homosexual given to public confessions of his sordid encounters, finally comes to terms with his sexuality. Sad Mr. Raney, widowed by Hydro's birth, finds comfort in his visions of an afterlife where mother and son reunite in Heaven's blues bar, with Robert Johnson playing on stage and Jesus serving Buds. Nordan nicely balances his raw subjects and over-the-top characters with an appealing sweetness and decency. State-of-the- art southern fiction. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-083-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
