Meticulous and graceful, though some may find the allusions, dense sentences, and sometimes-opaque narrative a touch...
A woman renounces a promising film career to raise two children, their life journeys weaving a gossamer tale of transitions and death.
Isabel Maher Murphy seems on the verge of movie stardom as Hollywood is turning from silent to talking pictures. Her screen test for Louis B. Mayer apparently pleased the “suits” of that time at M-G-M, but Archer chooses to walk off the set and return to her home in Rhode Island and marriage to an enterprising insurance salesman who could have walked off the streets of Sinclair Lewis’s Zenith. Like Garbo, Isabel, now Bel, never fully articulates her reasons for leaving Hollywood. Nor does author Howard offer full explanations in this third installment of a planned four-novel series (Big as Life, 2001; A Lover’s Almanac, 1998). Rather, with some sense of mystery, she spins out Bel’s life story, and the life stories of her daughter, Rita; her son, Joe, a Jesuit priest; and of a curious, young neighbor, Gemma Riccardi. Like silent film itself, the tales are told from alternating points of view (not always meaningfully “edited” together) and are highlighted by haunting, powerful images. Joe’s mission leads him to the violence of El Salvador, while chubby Rita faces the violence of the Mob through her marriage to a gangster. Gemma, a photographer seeking to imprint on her work a singular style, petitions Bel with questions: Why did she leave Hollywood? Was raising a family in a small coastal town more rewarding than acting? Bel’s answers appear encoded in moments she shares with her children, as when she delights in the role of a declaiming guide during their visit to a Melville museum. Bel’s life—and the lives of her children, reaching melancholy ends—unreel in what may have been her favorite film.
Meticulous and graceful, though some may find the allusions, dense sentences, and sometimes-opaque narrative a touch rarefied.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03358-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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