An unconvincing muddle.
McCoy’s fourth (after Divining Blood, 1992, etc.) strains every literary nerve and muscle to make significant the story of a teenager who finally learns why her mother is in prison for murder.
In this literary equivalent of bad fusion cuisine, a messed-up teenager, an unwed mother, a New Age foster mother, an ethnic older boyfriend, and a snake-handler are tossed together by pretentious prose into a Nebraska setting: altogether, a mix of ingredients that creates an indigestible tale. Narrator Junebug Host begins on Mother’s Day of her senior year in high school. She’s gone to visit Mom, who’s incarcerated in nearby Ladylock, the local women’s prison. Junebug doesn’t have a dad; Tess Host didn’t even know she was pregnant when, just graduated from high school, she went out to buy a snack and instead gave birth to a baby. On this particular Mother’s Day, Junebug learns for the first time that Tess killed their trailer-park neighbor because she thought he had sexually abused her daughter. When Mom was jailed, Junebug went to live with Gloria, a loving and tolerant caregiver despite her fondness for a variety of spiritual experiences, including snake-handling. After the prison visit, Junebug is picked up by her boyfriend, an older Italian-American who likes to be seen as dangerous though he’s really very traditional. Although dressed in a black leather miniskirt, Junebug suddenly has more than sex with Floren on her mind. She’s just remembered what really happened that long-ago afternoon when her mother picked up an axe and headed out of their trailer. As our heroine ponders what to do, she drops out of school, starts cutting herself, and watches a lot of TV with Gloria while they sip sherry. Tess, whose character is as unconvincing as the plot premise (no mention of lawyers or a criminal investigation), has some further confessions for poor Junebug, who’s finally driven to act—but unconventionally.
An unconvincing muddle.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-9728984-1-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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