Despite its flaws, an engrossing novel about a dysfunctional family, well suited for the beach.
A matriarch’s 75th birthday in 1985 sparks a family reunion, and the up-rooting of a few long-buried secrets.
This debut novel offers a reversal-of-fortune saga about a family from Philadelphia’s Main Line —an enclave of the city’s suburbs defined by old wealth and extravagant mansions. As the story opens, Dolly Scott has just been arrested in the middle of the night for trespassing on the grounds of the Hilltop Country Club, caught apparently trying to dig up a box of jewelry she had buried on the property decades earlier when it was still part of her grand estate, known as Llantrisant. Dolly, whose money was stolen by her husband, Dixon, before he ran off with his mistress, now lives in the former gatehouse of that estate. Meanwhile, the youngest of the three Scott offspring has been locked up in the pricy West Lawn mental sanitarium. The tale moves back and forth between 1985 and the 1950s (the decade during which the Scott family’s dysfunction gradually culminates in its ultimate downfall). Rhea writes the 1985 sections in the first-person voice of Dolly’s older daughter Hillary Scott Sherman, while the tales from the ’50s, which make up the great bulk of the narrative, are delivered in the third-person. The technique almost works, but with Hillary remaining the central protagonist, there is initially a discordant feel to the switch in voice, especially because she is the one who leads the reader into the retrospective by saying: “I slipped into a reverie about the old days. I guess you could say…the start of it all, was the day my brother [Trip] found our younger sister, Penny, locked in the tennis court.” But emerging from that point on is an engaging, well-delivered story that includes parental neglect, shattered egos, love, death, betrayal, and emotional fragility. Along the way, readers are treated to a blistering behind-the-scenes portrait of the lifestyles of Philadelphia’s socially elite. A concluding chapter, “Wrap-up,” is unsatisfyingly brief, but it does offer a surprise final twist. Unfortunately, it also leaves a couple of recurring questions about Dixon’s past unanswered.
Despite its flaws, an engrossing novel about a dysfunctional family, well suited for the beach.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5174-1538-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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