Sometimes denser than a tangle of snakes, but Berry’s story never fails to engage.
Feisty teenager copes with first love, glasses, disasters, and wayward adults in this fourth novel from Kincaid. (Verbena, 2002, etc.).
Berry Jackson is trudging through adolescence in the overheated hamlet of Pinetta, Florida. The absence of shopping malls and superhighways, and the presence of cat’s-eye frames, Rexall lunch counters, quicksand, and chain gangs suggest the 1950s or early ’60s. Fluent in the local patois, undeterred by myopia and misgivings about her appearance, Berry is a garrulous observer of the teeming life around her. She shares a bedroom with her two brothers, younger Wade and older, oversexed Sowell, inheritor of the family good looks. Mom Ruthie feeds hobos, slings coffee, and moons over the Methodist minister, Butch Lyons. Ford Jackson is a revered school principal but a cipher of a father. On the social ladder, the Jacksons fall midway between the Longmonts, who own the gas station/grocery, and the Millers, who inhabit a kudzu-choked shack and overbreed. Episodic vignettes establish an atmosphere in which serpents, poisonous and nonpoisonous, aren’t just archetypes but everyday nuisances. Butch Lyons skips town, and the Methodists are called to hear Jewel Longmont confess to a dalliance with him. The story, after a languorous start, accelerates when a tornado hits. The big storm follows “goodbye-night,” a prom where the Millers’ abused and gorgeous elder daughter, Rennie, makes her glamorous debut in a borrowed dress. Ford Jackson drives her home through a flood—and both disappear. Much of Pinetta is leveled by the twister, and the state sends in convicts to help reconstruct, including Raymond, who rescues Berry both from snakebite and wallflower-dom. Ruthie finds a safe harbor with Jack Longmont after Jewel flees with her daughter, Marie. In a diva-ex-machina ending, Rennie returns to expose some lies and perpetuate others, before the swamp extrudes the truth about the missing pillars of Pinetta.
Sometimes denser than a tangle of snakes, but Berry’s story never fails to engage.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-00914-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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