Few writers are so committed to using fiction to explore the intimate impact of formal regulations and informal social...
A dozen stories about homeownership, cohabitation, and other domestic perils, suffused to various degrees with Shriver’s (The Mandibles, 2016, etc.) political concerns.
The Standing Chandelier, the stellar novella that opens this collection, concerns Jillian, a bright but eccentric middle-aged artist who’s longtime best friends with Weston—until he gets engaged to Paige, who resents Jillian’s invasiveness (symbolized by the quirky wedding gift of the title) and demands he cut her off. The story recalls Shriver at her best (i.e., 2007’s The Post-Birthday World): keenly alert to interior matters of jealousy, romance, and friendship and exterior matters of manners and decorum. The entire collection is unified by the question of how new arrangements, be they via marriage or a house, change or reveal our personalities, though none of the stories quite matches the opener. A few are irony-rich satires about contemporary living: In “Negative Equity,” a married couple splits up but are loath to find new homes while their current one is underwater; in “Paradise to Perdition,” an embezzler finds life on the lam at a tropical resort is duller than he’d hoped for. But in recent years, Shriver has become something of a scold in both her essays and fiction about what she sees as our overly sensitive, gumption-impaired society, and a handful of these stories are effectively chastising op-eds. “The ChapStick” is a critique of the Transportation Security Administration told via a man hastening to reach his dying father; in “Domestic Terrorism” (note the overheated title), a couple is at a loss about what to do about their layabout son, a vehicle for much grousing about shiftless millennials; and the closing novella, The Subletter, sourly and clunkily likens the lives of two women writers with the warring factions during Ireland’s Troubles.
Few writers are so committed to using fiction to explore the intimate impact of formal regulations and informal social engineering, but it remains a hit-and-miss project.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-269793-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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.
