Plucked from the revolving carousel of Erdrich's Chippewa characters now is Lipsha Morrissey—the good-for-nothing doofus son of much-escaped convict Gerry Nanapush and spooky June Kapshaw- -who's been batting around off the reservation but returns and promptly falls stone in love with Shawnee Ray, a single mother half-pledged to the tribe's gambling-casino entrepreneur, the much older Lyman Lamartine. Lipsha's ardor is transcendental, biblical, greater-than-great; but Shawnee could take him or leave him—and does both. To win her wholly, Lipsha (who works at Lyman's bingo parlor) will go to any length, including subjecting himself to a vision-contest with Lyman—from which he returns sprayed on by a skunk. Finally, it's miracles and love medicine and spirit intercessions that bring everything into harmony—and that Erdrich, as ever, wants to celebrate. Yet unlike the precise, slapstick comedics of The Beet Queen (1986), here the doings are all overdetermined by the slap and slather of Erdrich's lyricism. There's no palpable Lipsha, no solid Shawnee—or Lyman or Gerry—but instead the artificial pressurizations of the strenuous style: "The not yet of his potential life was the perfect match for Shawnee's I am, her is, he reasoned, while Lyman's always was fit precisely with the no doubt of some other unnamed and successful woman." The skunk-episode and a late car-stealing scene involving a baby in the backseat have the zip and shading of accidents admiringly transfigured—but hardly anything else is that liberated. Erdrich, unusual for her, even resorts to sermonizing about gambling's malign effect on the reservation. Lots of fancy molding here, swirls and gewgaws—but an insubstantial palace in the end.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0061129755
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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