A well-written but overlong emotional drama with a far-too-churlish protagonist.
A woman is shaken by her late father’s scathingly critical journal entries in Wilke’s debut novel.
Leo Curzio, a professional writer, avidly chronicled his thoughts for his entire adult life, resulting in boxes of journals containing his meditations on just about everything. After he dies of a stroke, his adult children start to read them, and some are shocked by his brutal judgments. His harshest criticisms were aimed at his daughter Tessa, and he expressed profound disappointment in the distance between her considerable promise as a musician and meager accomplishments as a writer. Tessa is distraught after reading the entries, and she starts to rethink her life in its totality: her failed relationships, her abandoned music career, her abandonment of Catholicism and temporary embrace of Scientology, and her writing career, which she loves but frustrates her. She turns to her aunt, Joanne, a therapist and spiritual counselor, for some solace, and she delves into an assignment for the magazine that employs her—a series on father-daughter relationships. But all this angst-ridden self-reflection takes an emotional toll on her, and her relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Dave, starts to molder under the strain. Wilke writes with razor-sharp wit and radiant flair, and the prose’s high quality is the novel’s principal strength. She also sensitively portrays how real love and affection can survive and even flourish in an otherwise dysfunctional family. However, Tessa’s world-weariness, while often a source of comedic relief, eventually becomes tedious and, at times, painfully self-indulgent. For example, when Dave offers her a heartfelt apology for missing Leo’s funeral, she acidly responds: “Maybe when you’re reviewing your new corporate candidates for your next relationship, you can make sure none of them actually expect you to show up for the important moments. Because while you were busy judging me and my pathetic worldview, you forgot to realize what a shallow, meaningless, unforgivable prick you are.”
A well-written but overlong emotional drama with a far-too-churlish protagonist.Pub Date: May 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4975-9630-6
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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