An unlikable protagonist can be an invigorating challenge, but in this case a better title might have been The Worst Kind of...
A Californian flies to Rome to help her widowed brother-in-law care for her troubled teenage niece; instead, she wreaks havoc.
Self-pity, self-indulgence, self-rationalization, and general resentment are narrator Cilla’s principal charms in Jacobs’ (Catalina, 2017) second novel. Not that some of Cilla’s general resentment is not justified. She is stuck caring for her aging mother, a former actress who frequently compares Cilla to her younger, prettier sister, Emily. Now 43, Cilla was seduced when barely 15 by her screenwriter father’s 33-year-old protégé, Guy, with whom Cilla remains entwined personally and professionally despite his new, very young girlfriend. While she blames the predatory creep for damaging her life, it irks Cilla that Emily always distrusted him, first as a young girl and more recently as a mother. It also irks Cilla that Emily rose from a “failed” modeling career and drug issues to become college professor Paul’s wife, a celebrated belle in his academic circle. But Emily has recently died of cancer, and Paul has moved to Rome with their 15-year-old daughter, Hannah, who has begun “acting out” in small delinquencies and running with a group of older teens. When he asks Cilla to visit, she jumps at the chance to escape her hospitalized mother. But instead of offering Hannah nurturing support, Cilla joins in partying with the teens and quickly begins an ever escalating flirtation with 17-year-old Donato, who happens to be the son of Paul’s close friends. Thoughtless lust combines with ambivalent jealousy/grief regarding Emily, whom Hannah and Paul remember as more loving and thoughtful than Cilla has described, and ambivalent protectiveness/competitiveness regarding Hannah, who has a serious crush on Donato and is the same age Cilla was when Guy seduced her. As Cilla rationalizes her selfish behavior with Donato, the novel moves slowly but inexorably toward disaster. Only the extent of the mess selfish, narcissistic Cilla leaves in her wake will be a surprise.
An unlikable protagonist can be an invigorating challenge, but in this case a better title might have been The Worst Kind of Woman.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27266-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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