New Yorker Tillman (Cast in Doubt, 1992, etc.) returns to fiction after her recent book of essays (The Broad Picture, p. 939), vividly conveying a heat-maddened day and night in one woman's complex relationship with her East Village neighborhood, a junkie zone where everyone has an attitude and no one gets ahead. On her block, Elizabeth Hall is in the minority in more ways than one: She's white, well-educated, has a regular job, and she cares about her surroundings. While morons are cavorting down in the street during the wee hours, dumping trash cans and smashing windshields, she's up in her window watching and fantasizing about how she might kill them off. After her do-nothing landlord sends notice of a rent increase, Elizabeth responds to a neighbor's call to resist, successfully working the city bureaucracy until the landlord relents—a pyrrhic victory in light of the fact that there's still no lock on her building's front door to keep the junkies from shooting up (or even worse) in the hallways as they please. Meanwhile, as Elizabeth walks her street, she talks sympathetically with Jeanine the hooker and Gisela the crazy bag- lady, offering what consolation she can. But her sleepless nights, her dead-end job as a magazine proofreader, her relentlessly ironic boyfriend, and the shadow man who watches her from his window across the street as she finally takes action, firing eggs surreptitiously from her fire escape onto the heads of another band of troublemakers, add up to a life in which heroic action achieves the same result as treading water. Tillman's view of city life seen through the not-quite-jaded eyes of a determined survivor has its share of honest moments and rough humor, but too much familiar material and a steady stream of fair-to-weak jokes unmercifully dilute this fourth novel.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-100272-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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