The novel, first issued via Twitter in blocks of slightly more than 100 characters, provides easy entertainment in book form.
The author's first novel lifts the misadventures and mishaps, ambition and artifice from the French Revolution and reproduces them in San Francisco, recalibrating the affair with a touch of post-modernism and more than a whiff of whimsy.
The story begins with Esmeralda Van Twinkle—once a celebrity pastry chef who ambition propelled into eating herself into a morbidly obese copy-shop employee—being seduced by a professional discount coupon distributor, Jasper Winslow. The aphrodisiac is “Zoogman's masterpiece,” a “triple chocolate truffle swirl cheesecake.” The assignation produces twins, Marat and Robespierre Van Twinkle, names bestowed because the boy and girl were born on Bastille Day. Assorted bizarre characters enter, leave and reappear across a narrative timeline, which extends into the future, where opposition to a war in Iran compels daughter Robespierre to enter San Francisco politics. There she will be undone in a race for mayor by a convoluted conspiracy, prompted by Marat's duplicities and with Jasper's sins as the catalyst. Readers might think the latter is a stretch, given what they've learned of humble Jasper. Every character, large or small, is exaggerated past eccentricity, a seemingly deliberate plot/narrative device. Esmeralda is never an especially sympathetic protagonist. Her children, her mother, Fanny, a sad tyrant trapped in a widow's cottage, the supporting cast of drug dealers, murderers and such generate no empathy either. But the characters are what they need to be to make the story viable. Chapters begin with short comments on the French Revolution, and history buffs can find allusions to the bloody quest for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Best of all, Stewart's language sparkles, sometimes riffing like Bob Dylan, always moving the narrative forward.
The novel, first issued via Twitter in blocks of slightly more than 100 characters, provides easy entertainment in book form.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59376-283-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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