For all his careful construction, Stein’s novel never quite takes off.
Stein (This Room Is Yours, 2004, etc.) examines the chance reunion of two former lovers in his brief fifth novel.
It’s been 12 years since the passionate year-long affair between Jonathan Parrish and Lily Mayeux. They had grown up as neighbors in rural Connecticut; on one return visit, the 30-year-old Jonathan realized Lily, eight years younger, had become a beautiful young woman. They quickly became lovers, Lily moving in with him in New York. Jonathan was working for the UN as an educator, flying into war zones around the world and helping local children recover. Their crisis came when Lily’s sister died suddenly. Jonathan was in Nicaragua. Lily cabled him to return for the funeral; he waited three weeks. By then, Lily’s heart had hardened, and she ended the relationship. Now it’s 1984, and 43-year-old Jonathan is driving to New Orleans for an educational conference at which he’s a featured speaker; he lives in Vermont, where he’s a university teacher while still undertaking assignments for UNESCO. Lily, now herself a teacher, will be flying in from Maine; she has a husband, an okay marriage and a four-year-old son. Jonathan has stayed single; he’s had two serious affairs, but Lily remains the love of his life. Not much happens in New Orleans. They meet for lunch and two dinners in Jonathan’s suite. Stein switches back and forth between Jonathan’s and Lily’s viewpoints, making this a he-thinks/she-thinks tale, in which the influence of the past on the present is all-important. The construction is arid; more dialogue would have been welcome. Their mutual attraction is still intense, though finding expression only in one kiss. Will this be an American Brief Encounter? Or will Lily leave her husband “to take the side of daring and madness”? Stein proves, disappointingly, to be as ambivalent as his characters, tacking on a makeshift ending.
For all his careful construction, Stein’s novel never quite takes off.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-57962-150-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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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