Art conquers all: Family mysteries are solved, and sassy, determined women triumph.
A compelling saga of love, film and family secrets.
In her third venture, Southgate (The Fall of Rome, 2001) braids a multigenerational tale of the loves and ambitions of mothers and daughters. In the mid-1950s, Mildred is a middle-class black housewife in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with an open love of movies and a secret love of the town’s film projectionist. Film provides fascination and solace for Mildred, who slips away from a haunted family past to meet her lover in the darkened Dreamland Theater. In the ’70s, Mildred’s daughter Angela also falls for film, leaving her seemingly stable future in Tulsa for life as an actress in Los Angeles. Yet after running headlong at her career, she finds herself typecast in the nudie bits of blaxploitation films, and her relationship with Mildred grows strained. After an unplanned pregnancy, Angela leaves the limited world of bit-part acting to raise her daughter Tamara. In the ’80s, Tamara grows up watching her mother on film. Movies, the vestiges of Angela’s former life, help kindle Tamara’s interest in film, but as her interest in serious filmmaking grows, Tamara becomes ashamed of her mother. She sets out for New York, where she enrolls in a directing program, and cuts herself off from Angela. Yet when illness calls Angela and Tamara back to Tulsa for the first time since Angela’s pregnancy, Tamara takes her camera and uncovers a past she didn’t even know she was missing. Suddenly the private desires, hidden secrets and life struggles of mothers and daughters come into sharp and rich focus. Like the documentary film that Tamara eventually makes, Southgate’s record cuts and jumps back between the three plotlines, which the author deftly weaves into a richly textured whole.
Art conquers all: Family mysteries are solved, and sassy, determined women triumph.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-47023-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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