Urrea, whose collection of nonfiction vignettes about Mexicans living near the California border (Across the Wire, 1993) appeared last year, here fictionalizes similar material with uneven results. This is a tale of Mexican and American friendship: beginning in hatred, it transverses in a few months more pitfalls than most people experience in a lifetime and ends in a familial bond. Mike McGurk's mother died when he was seven. His father, an amateur wrestler, runs a gas station in Arizona. Turk's idea of a good time is trading four-letter insults with his son. To get a better sense of this quirky dysfunctional family that had ``no word for love,'' take the example of Turk lying about his 16-year-old son's age so Mike can enlist in WW II, then being horrified that the boy didn't kill a damn Kraut. Somewhere, amid all this, Mike becomes extremely sensitive. At 28, when he meets his rich, attractive cousin, he's fairly inexperienced sexually. These brief, magnificently written chapters are the perfect form to depict such trivialities. But Urrea's on more tenuous ground when minor incidents become picayune (getting beat up because you hate lima beans or discoursing on what a job it is when cotton shirts get wrinkles). While aiming for a comic effect, he inadvertently turns his characters into dolts. Emotionally potent scenes, such as when Mike goes home with Bobo and stays with his Mexican friend's family, deteriorate into slapstick. But there are also passages of unspoiled emotion: Mike busy in the kitchen while his father dies in the living room; Bobo's memories of WW II and sense of helplessness when he came upon the remains of Buchenwald. Despite vivid descriptions, the poetic language takes readers one step away instead of thrusting them into the thick of the action. There's plenty going on here; what's lacking is a narrative frame.
Pub Date: April 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017089-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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