Landvik’s third effort (Your Oasis on Flame Lake, 1997, etc.) has an appealingly wacky frolic to it but induces groans when it strives for serious insight. The far outpost of Tall Pines, Minnesota, is a whirlwind of romance, violence, and minor characters who are downright weird. Fenny, for openers, was born to adventuring parents, who were constantly perplexed by her lack of bravado. When she was 19 (three years ago), they died in a freak accident in Belize (truck, tandem bicycle). In her grief, Fenny began to hang out at Cup O—Delight, a cafÇ owned by Lee, the red-haired and queen-sized heiress who came to Tall Pines fleeing an abusive marriage. Other locals include a Vietnam vet who vocalizes like a dog (post-traumatic stress) and a pair of art-collecting lesbians (one black, with a blond beehive; the other Swiss, with an annoying accent and a fez). While scouting locations, a Hollywood scriptwriter spies the fetching Fenny, and before you know it she’s starring in a local shoot. When Big Bill saunters into town—tall, dark, and handsome—both Lee and Fenny fall in love with him and a pas de trois ensues. Meanwhile, Pete, a humble shoemaker, is in love with Lee. Unable to tell her, he secretly makes ’shoes of love” for her. Just as he’s about to speak the truth and give her the shoes, Lee’s deranged ex-husband bursts into the Cup O—Delight and starts a shooting spree. Pete takes a bullet and dies saving Lee. The shooting disperses everyone else and brings about several ham-handed epiphanies. Eventually, Bill finds himself in a quickie wedding and the father of a love child, but not with the same woman. And Fenny learns that she’s brave after all! Happiness and chuckles all around. Not dull, even amusing at times. But with its soap-opera dialogue and just-add-water characters, it will chafe with wanting more. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-43317-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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