An intimate study of love and friendship, and the stoic resignation with which we sometimes do without both, this latest from poet Chernoff (Signs of Devotion, 1993, etc.) introduces four memorable characters on a quest for human compassion. Irena, a recently arrived immigrant from Poland, leaves her mathematician past to explore the new world of Chicago with eyes both bright and bitter. She has found work caring for the aged Harrison Waters, a once-renowned jazz pianist left sad and wistful because of crippling arthritis. Moments of the pair's lives are comfortingly exchanged: Irena talks of Josef, the lover she left behind in Warsaw, and Mr. Waters reminisces about his beloved wife Gwen. Further up in their posh Chicago high-rise, meanhwile, lives one of the more compelling characters of recent fiction: 79-year- old Jack Kaufman. Dying of cancer, Jack is cared for by the beautiful and elusive Elizabeth (fleeing memories too painful to admit), who meets Irena in the basement laundry room. Though the two become companions, sharing the details of their lives with old men, their friendship is that of exiles, built on mutual loneliness, not affection. Despite the dynamic of the women's relationship, the book's focus always gravitates back to Jack Kaufman. He relates the checkered history of his life to his estranged grandson Adam, who is videotaping this piece of Chicago history for his thesis. From Jack's meager beginning as a skinny Jewish kid on the streets, to his rise through the ranks of the criminal underworld during the Depression, to a final ascension placing him among the wealthiest businessmen of the city, Jack is a compelling slice of urban Americana. Though the plot eventually falters a bit, rushing everyone to Poland for the finale, it's only a slight flaw in a well-crafted story. Charismatic characters turn what might have been just a study in the solace of memories into an enjoyable and engaging novel.
Pub Date: May 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-56689-041-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
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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