All the trappings of southern gothic—death, race, religion, and violence among country folk—coupled with big ideas about the...
Second-novelist Haynes (Mother of Pearl, 1999) prunes back her lush plotting, while maintaining both an extraordinary style and a firm grounding in her native South of the 1960s, to produce a satisfying tale of violence and redemption.
Haynes's double plot, as one of her characters might say, don't shake square. Beginning in 1961, she recounts the journey of 16-year-old Hezekiah Sheehand to Chalktown, a mythic place where folk communicate with one another on chalkboards posted on their porches. With him he carries his retarded five-year-old brother Yellababy. Their mother, Susan-Blair, has alternately worried about Yellababy and physically abused him through the years. But in her world, this don't count too strong against a woman trying to get life's floorboards straightened up. Cutting to 1955, Haynes introduces Annie and her mother Rosie, together with Aaron, Mr. Prox, and Johnny Roper—all of them involved in various ways with the death of Annie and her stillborn child. After much narrative evasion, the official inquiry lists Annie's death as suicide, though no one believes it, and Rosie soon starts posting biblical passages on her porch chalkboard. Back in 1961, Hezekiah arrives with his brother and Cathy, a curious, ponytailed girl he's met on the road, and takes up residence in Annie's abandoned house. The foundling boy immediately consumes Rosie's attention, and the town is more or less tidily healed. Presiding over both stories is Marion, a wise black neighbor to the Sheehands, who, weary and tolerant of the South's racist suffocations, is the perfect witness when the two strands finally come together.
All the trappings of southern gothic—death, race, religion, and violence among country folk—coupled with big ideas about the place of God in these proceedings. Yet Haynes's lyrical prose will captivate readers willing to overlook a few ungainly knots in the storytelling.Pub Date: May 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6656-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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