A wild ride. Too long and too much fun.
The Internet, blind faith in the Web, and a good-sized chunk of American culture take a hammering in an ambitious debut.
Heppner has bitten off more than he can chew, but so did Dickens and Balzac, so a little patience is in order. Taking a jittery trip from the first days of the Defense-funded Internet to the post-urban sprawl of the World Wide Web, with looks backward to the origin of movable type and the start of cheap printing, Heppner manages to get good solid licks in on such deserving targets as—well, Target, Calvin Klein porno-ads, motivational seminars, and mindless Internet hype. The technique isn’t for the beginning reader, nor really for anyone who hasn’t spent way too much time mousing around cyberspace, losing track of time, geography, and whatever it was they started out reading about or looking for. Heppner’s construction involves what seem to be thousands of short chapters that click back and forth wildly but not mindlessly through decades and centuries. The big cast includes Olden Field, hard- and soft-ware–savvy child of brilliant, goofed-up scientists; Simon Mould, talentless child of mismatched, miserable would-be merchandisers; Derek and Donna Skye, burned-out superstar of the self-improvement set and his wife; Gray Hollows, a writer-turned-copywriter whose ad-slimeball campaigns just can’t fail no matter how low he goes; and dozens of others, all wandering in what seems, until near the end, to be Brownian motion on the fringe of a city somewhere in the American Midwest, bouncing off each other and the scenery in their quests variously to lay low the ascendance of the Internet with a big dose of disinformation; hook into celebrity culture using a terrified child; preserve the gorgeousness of print; and escape the desert of motel seminars. The faint centripetal force is the Gloria Corporation, mindless controller of a critical mass of motion through the Internet. But the true gravity comes from the author’s old-fashioned grasp of his characters.
A wild ride. Too long and too much fun.Pub Date: June 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41290-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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