From a young Southern writer of note, a top-notch debut collection of stories, most of them revolving around motherhood, animals and conflicting loyalties.
Stories from Bergman’s collection have appeared in Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South, as well as in major literary magazines, and it’s easy to see why. In the luminous opener, “Housewifely Arts,” a single mom drives her 7-year-old son nine hours south to a roadside zoo near Myrtle Beach in hopes of hearing one last time her mother’s voice...or rather the perfect mimicry of that voice by the 36-year-old African gray parrot who had to be given away in the mother's dotage. In “The Cow That Milked Herself,” a young mother-to-be gets an ultrasound in the office of her husband, a loving but distracted and harried veterinarian. “Yesterday’s Whales” dramatizes a woman’s ambivalence—or perhaps better to say that she grapples with her surprising lack of ambivalence—when she discovers that she is pregnant by her boyfriend, a fellow population-control activist and the leader of an anti-reproduction collective called Enough With Us that fulminates against unthinking, selfish “breeders.” In “Every Vein a Tooth,” a woman who shelters refugee animals (feral cats, a one-eyed chinchilla, three injured and ancient golden retrievers, a declawed raccoon) watches helplessly as her boyfriend, a hunter and outdoorsman, drifts away. His parting words come when she agrees to take into her home the ravenous, foul-smelling sheep of an urban shepherd: “You are looking for things to put between us.” The woman’s response is typical of the tender, smart, hard-nosed heroines of Bergman’s tales: “Maybe it was true.” But recognizing that doesn't change either her conviction or her decision—pained, hard-won, but hers—to carry on as she always has, no matter the human consequences. The collection’s second half doesn’t quite measure up to the level of the first, but that’s a minor flaw in a book that deserves big praise. The beginning, one suspects, of a fine career.
Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4335-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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