Connect-the-dots predictable except for those occasional tasty morsels of nastiness.
Forty-five years of a bad marriage laid out in pat detail, by the author, most recently, of Surrender Dorothy (1999).
On the way to Helsinki, where her novelist husband Joe is to receive a major literary award, 64-year-old Joan Castleman relives their years together as she steels herself to tell Joe she’s leaving him. They met during her freshman year at Smith, where he was her English professor. All the girls were smitten by the young, darkly handsome Jew whose wife had just had his baby, but Joan was the one he noticed, both for her blond beauty (and impeccable debutante WASP credentials) and for her natural writing talent. Soon they began a torrid affair, dampened only slightly when she read a less than brilliant story he’d published. After his wife throws Joe out, Joan happily drops out of college to set up house with him in Greenwich Village, where she works as an editorial assistant to support them while he writes his first novel. The book, based on their affair, is a hit, launching his career. Having lost touch with his child from his first wife, Joe has been a less than involved father to the three he’s had with Joan: two daughters, one whose gayness seems completely gratuitous, and an emotionally troubled son who threatened his father one night (the vague, pulled-punches quality of that scene typifying the story as a whole). While Joe has always given Joan credit for helping him with his work, he’s also had frequent dalliances with other women (and, if Joan’s brittle narration is any clue, it might seem hard to blame him). Eventually, Joan drops the bomb: just as her kids always suspected, she wrote the books for which Joe took credit. After his fatal coronary, will she keep her secret to preserve his reputation?
Connect-the-dots predictable except for those occasional tasty morsels of nastiness.Pub Date: April 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-86940-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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