Affecting in its guileless way, if ultimately predictable.
A lurid chronicle of a young man’s slow decline into heroin addiction; this novel, the author’s debut, was originally self published.
The gateway drug for Luke isn’t alcohol or marijuana, but midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When we first meet the hero, he’s an awkward Atlanta teenager obsessed with sex and fed up with the way his stepfather, Victor, abuses his mother and younger brother. His escape hatch is a girl who introduces him to the folks who live for the cult film, and through them he quickly discovers the pleasures of weed, coke and LSD. But those three drugs eventually lose their glamour for Luke, and within two years he has dropped out of school and is shooting heroin. Daniels’ nearly artless style deflects overdramatization, with Luke plainly relating every bad move, every fit of anger toward his family and every moment of self-degradation. (A series of chapters in which he’s a film extra playing an imprisoned Union soldier is as allegorical as matters get.) Daniels’ pacing is strong as well; the episodic chapters, covering about four years in Luke’s life in the early ’90s (Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the O.J. trial and the Oklahoma City bombing are mentioned), make plain how slow the path to addiction is, yet how quickly it swallows a person up. The problem with all this verisimilitude, though, is that it doesn’t give Daniels much to work with: Luke’s life is a tiny one, circumscribed around scoring drugs, taking drugs, finding money to score drugs (a job laying flooring gives way to less dignified methods of getting money) and hanging out with druggy friends. Once Luke is deep into junkiedom halfway through the novel, Daniels often slips into a then-this-happened brand of storytelling which gets into the grotesque details of track marks and ODs but is void of characterization. In the end, the novel lacks a narrative worthy of its candor.
Affecting in its guileless way, if ultimately predictable.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-165683-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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