A fine first effort that could have used a little more ambition.
Teenaged delinquents spin their minor lives into unremarkable oblivion.
Newcomer Robinson has a thing for the idiosyncrasies and bad weather of Maine, a love that’s expressed rather bittersweetly through these 11 stories. The title piece has several telling elements in it, though it remains one of the author’s less successful efforts. In it, two teen hoodlums are mucking about in a teen hoodlum kind of way, shooting bottle-rockets over a road: “Ziegler was into cheap thrills, like me, and cared only about not getting caught.” Thusly, the narrator ends up in the car of a police officer who, not much later, will be having a heart attack in the snow. In “Seeing the World” and “Puckheads,” weak-willed narrators still in their formative, if not high school, years, are paired off with more charismatic best friends who, after brief and depressing struggles, walk off with the girl. Standing out from the others is the introductory story, “The Diver,” in which a yuppie, restaurant-owning couple hires a diver to clear a snag off their boat’s propeller. In the manner of all yuppies-in-peril stories from “Knife in the Water” onward, the resentful, working-class diver does the job he’s been hired for, but hangs around, not-so-subtly and dangerously hinting at how much he envies the couple’s lives. Violence lurks in every line of this piece, an efficient little tale that’s unsettling for all its predictability. There are few high spots and just about no low ones in Robinson’s debut, with most of his prose hitting somewhere in a respectable middle. He conveys the cold, odd loneliness of a small Maine town without belaboring the point, but needs to find a different paradigm for his teenagers, always running after their cooler friend and the girl who got away.
A fine first effort that could have used a little more ambition.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-051368-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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