A hyperkinetic debut about an intern’s induction into the byzantine manners of Manhattan’s Bellevue hospital. David Levy, M.D., naively starts his internship imagining that he—ll find orderly learning and ample opportunity to ease suffering and save lives. Instead, he finds himself going through the motions with chronically ill patients while being alternately ridiculed and ignored by the resident in charge—“Fat” Goldman, a chain-smoking grouch with a schoolboy crush on wily Delia, a medical student. David’s childhood friend and fellow intern Sal incurs Goldman’s wrath by showily pursuing Delia himself and then flaunting his success. Meanwhile, amidst the requisite drudgery and humbling run-ins with nurses, David worries about Sal, whose performance is increasingly erratic. Making matters worse, no one seems to be supervising Goldman: The attending physician, Dr. Kell, has only one concern—enlisting patients for his top-secret study involving intravenous doses of an unnamed red liquid. After several blow-ups, Sal is suddenly nowhere to be found, then shows up in the emergency room days later, sweaty and delirious. Are Delia’s machinations or Dr. Kell’s protocols somehow to blame? Just as he seems to be getting better, Sal disappears from the hospital, then turns up dead. Worn down by despair, theatrical nightmares, and incoherent (exhaustion-fueled?) suspicions, David gets caught up in his own career-jeopardizing dalliance with Delia. Luckily, though, he gets over her, becomes reconciled to injustice and chaos, and buckles down to learn his trade. Author-internist Siegel’s group portrait of the oddballs and visionaries who inhabit Bellevue’s wards is lively and often engaging. But the rushing about engendered by David’s preoccupation with Sal is tiresome, and if nefarious goings-on did lead to Sal’s death, they aren’t spelled out in the whiny final confrontation between David and Dr. Kell. A messy mix, then, of satire, sleep deprivation, and suspense, without payoff.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-83602-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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