A seductive read—the literary equivalent of a hammock, a warm breeze, and a tumbler of whiskey—certain to breed in readers a...
A sumptuously lazy fourth novel from Lemann (The Fiery Pantheon, 1998, etc.), this about a transplanted southerner adjusting to life in California.
Narrator Fleming Ford has a lot to say about not much in particular, and God bless her for saying it. A journalist and mother from Alabama, she’s married to engineer Mac, who’s brought the family to Esperenza, California, on the desert near the Mexican border, while he works on a water project. Fleming is trying to keep her career with a New York newspaper going, but she’s having a hard time coming up with stories, a problem not helped by her department’s name of “New Perspectives.” She’s also falling in love with Mr. Lieberman, the English media tycoon and owner of the paper, whom she runs into on the street in New York. Slim, elegant, just dripping with Old World panache, he satisfies her need for a particular type of decadence plus offering link to her southern past (Lieberman’s recently deceased wife hailed from Alabama as well). Meanwhile, Esperenza is driving Fleming to the brink: the never-changing weather, omnipresent mariachi bands, and beautiful houses cut from the desert five minutes prior to your moving in—it all breeds in her a desperate yearning for history, seediness, age. That her infatuation with Lieberman is pretty harmless is clear from the start, at least to the reader if not to the obsessing Fleming, who’s worried about her marriage, even if nobody else is: “All men are dangerous until you get married. But of course after that they are lethal.” Little plot-ground gets covered by the end, but that’s all right. There’s no need for plot if atmosphere, attitude, and plenty of good talk can carry you along.
A seductive read—the literary equivalent of a hammock, a warm breeze, and a tumbler of whiskey—certain to breed in readers a desire for decadent ennui and slow ruin.Pub Date: June 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1548-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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