It’s possible to imagine literary recluses J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee coming out of hiding to forge this shaggy, rakish,...
A gripping, scorching, and at times vexing debut novel tracks the physical and psychological jolts that come with growing up mixed race above and below the Mason-Dixon line at opposite ends of the 1960s.
When we first meet Huey Fairchild, it's 1969 and he’s in very big trouble. The only student of color at an all-boys prep school in Manhattan, the 15-year-old Huey has knocked a white student unconscious in the dining hall. Their dispute is over a girl, though school authorities immediately misperceive the cause. But then, misperception is the story of Huey’s life, and author Hansen offers the flashbacks to prove it. The story makes frequent and sustained shifts back in time to Akersburg, Georgia, seven years earlier, when 8-year-old Huey, though precocious and keenly observant in so many ways, cannot understand why his summer is being ruined at every turn. First, the local swimming pool is shut down shortly after he’s about to use it. Then black protestors show up outside a downtown luncheonette to demonstrate, and in the ensuing uproar, Huey is struck by a car and breaks his arm. Then a black farmhand who’d worked with Huey’s white peanut-farmer father before joining the demonstrations falls to his death from a ladder, arousing grief and suspicion from the local black community. Huey’s reactions throughout that summer of 1962 are curious. His attitudes toward the local African-American population are as oblivious and, sometimes, dismissive as those of his father. At one point, he recalls thinking of his light-skinned black mother as “the darkest white person I know.” And there’s no letup when the summer ends. His first day back at school, the younger Huey responds to a barrage of racial epithets directed toward him by saying to his teacher, “my daddy is white, so I’m white. You know that, right?” Such credulity mystifies and, at times, exasperates the reader until one understands that Huey’s painful passage toward understanding himself is a proper analogy for the struggle America has, to the present day, to understand its own complex fate.
It’s possible to imagine literary recluses J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee coming out of hiding to forge this shaggy, rakish, yet haunting account of a smart aleck’s coming-of-age in harsh times.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7232-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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