An assured introduction. Readers will want to hear more from Griffin, though perhaps without sputtering motors and whirring...
Deliberately paced, thoughtful story of men in love over many years against considerable odds.
Gay life in the South doesn't always take place in a colonial row house in Savannah or a beachfront condo in Myrtle Beach. In Griffin’s debut novel, it's lived out in the shadows in a run-down North Carolina mill town, where Wendell Wilson, a taxidermist, has lived a long and eventful life with Frank Clifton, a World War II veteran who melted Wendell’s heart the minute they met. Or melted the world, anyway, for with Frank’s smile, “the branches shuddered off their casts of ice, and the power lines broke free of their insulation, snapped taut and scattered it over the street in pieces that still cupped the hollow channel where the wire had run.” That’s some powerful allure. The title of Griffin’s novel is both noun and verb, for while Wendell works magic with the bodies of unfortunate animals, the men keep their relationship secret, lest they be hounded out of town. But now Frank is 83, has had a mild stroke, and has affairs to get in order. As Frank grapples with a faltering mind and body and difficult memories of war—crushing the head of an enemy soldier with a rock “ain’t the worst I did,” he grumbles—Wendell finds himself in the unwished-for role of caretaker. Griffin’s story sometimes feels derivative, with dollops of Annie Proulx here and lashings of Allan Gurganus there, with some Jane Smiley and perhaps Bobbie Ann Mason thrown in for good measure. But it also feels genuine, recounting the love of two very different people made to live in fear but who endure with considerable dignity, allowing for the occasional mishap. On that note, animal lovers will shudder at one terrible episode, late in the book, involving a dog and a lawn mower. Suffice it to say, it’s not for the squeamish.
An assured introduction. Readers will want to hear more from Griffin, though perhaps without sputtering motors and whirring blades.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-338-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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