The crises seem desultory, and the triumphs somewhat cheerless, but French author Desplechin captures a thick sense of...
A well-written, articulate US debut, a collection of moments and glimpses rendered in a drowsily meditative prose, chronicles an improbably successful partnership between two women as they wrestle together a contentment that has thus far eluded them.
The nameless first-person narrator, a freelance ad copywriter and a single mother with various unsatisfying men in her life, hires Olivia to baby-sit her children, Thomas and Suzanne. Olivia, an obese drug addict in exile from the streets, is invited to move in, and the yearlong dialogue between the two women carries along much of the tale, much of it pervaded by a feeling of ennui. The opening pages nicely capture the narrator's drifting, loveless malaise as she grapples with the dissatisfactions of her work and the always-looming need for income. Olivia—wounded, ill, filled with secrets and unspoken cruelties from her past—ignites her employer's interest. A woman of engaging opacity and a penchant for untimely confession, she disorients the narrator's sense of order in the world with her routines, habits of mind—indeed, her very psychology. Olivia's moral structure, her method of friendship, and the contours of her history are unlike anything the copywriter has seen. Along with her penchant for abrasive tales of drug use and sexual abuse, Olivia displays a very soulful capacity for friendship and solicitude. "Olivia's genius," the narrator writes, "saunters through the territory of goodness, whistling." In an inversion of fortunes, Olivia goes back to school, loses weight, and quits drugs while the narrator, after dwelling among suicidal passions for an anxious weekend, elects to move back home with her parents. As a final note, she begins a novel (presumably this one) concerning an unlikely friendship between two women.
The crises seem desultory, and the triumphs somewhat cheerless, but French author Desplechin captures a thick sense of "everydayness"—which is, after all, where much of our lives are spent.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27214-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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