With his subtitle, "The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling," Helprin winks at the picaresque, Torn Jones tradition in which this enormously ambitious, enormously talented, and enormously unsuccessful first novel is shakily grounded. Certainly Marshall's cosmopolitan odyssey has its picarequisite share of outlandish incident and ourtrageous coincidences: born to a dying Jewish refugee on a Palestine-bound ship in 1947; raised by a rich Jew in the Hudson Valley (where he wrestles with an eagle) and Jamaica (where, being a sharpshooter/genius, he leads an Anglo attack on Rastafarians); half-educated at Harvard; employed at a nightmare-like slaughterhouse; shipwrecked and happenstanced into the arms of his childhood sweetheart; propelled through Europe to Israel, where he serves—all unbeknownst—under his real father in the bureaucracy Israeli army, just in time to predict and survive (?) the October War. But neither Helprin nor Marshall has the high-spirited drive to send one set-piece snowballing into the next; we're constantly aware of the arbitrariness of the design and the sheer locomotive effort. And despite—or because of—his myriad endowments and extensive introspections, the mythic hero remains faceless, a distinct drawback when his fortunes swing toward the earthbound. Marshall's identity-search is clearly intended to work serio-comically on both personal (autobiographical?) and theme-dream/East-West levels—a tricky business. That it works on neither is no reflection on Helprin's basic narrative equipment, which, aside from slips into sophomorics (to an admiral: "Are you contemplating your naval problems?"), lyric pretensions, or New Yorker-ish listmaking, can dish up the ironies, dialects, and images needed to keep pace with his prodigious imagination. That imagination has been on better display in Helprin's short stories and will no doubt be on better display in sharper, less grandiose novels to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1977
ISBN: 0156031078
Page Count: 564
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1977
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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