With its delicate phrasing, softly voiced but insightful portraits, and unsensational handling of the love triangles, Woods’...
The four wives of Ernest Hemingway—each loved, each abandoned—are given understated yet telling voices as they recount their relationships with a mercurial giant of literature.
“He is so good at being in love that Ernest Hemingway makes a rotten husband,” reckons Martha Gellhorn, the third and most rebellious of the writer’s four spouses. Hemingway’s life is familiar territory, and Wood (The Godless Boys, 2011) treads close on the heels of The Paris Wife, Paula McLain’s recent novel about Hadley, the first Mrs. Hemingway, but still brings freshness and grace to her matrimonial survey. Thrifty Hadley, from the Midwest, is the most conventional of the women, Hemingway’s companion during his poorest years. Her mistake is to try to stifle her husband’s affair with wealthy Fife (Pauline Pfeiffer) by embracing it; the trio’s tense 1926 holiday in the south of France ends with Hemingway selecting his mistress over his wife. Twelve years later, in Key West, it’s Fife’s turn to be displaced, this time by young Gellhorn, the future war correspondent. After his second divorce, Hemingway and Gellhorn live together idyllically in Cuba, but as he slows down and suggests children (despite already having three), she refuses to stop working. Tired of his selfishness, Gellhorn eventually asks for a divorce in Paris during its liberation in 1944; although Hemingway resists, he’s already writing love poems to Mary Welsh, to whom he will be married when he commits suicide in 1961. Evocative of place, neat in structure, Wood’s novel occasionally tries to understand Hemingway’s promiscuity but in essence leaves his perspective out of the picture, instead presenting his charisma, grandstanding, prodigious boozing and dark complexity from the individual points of view of the women: “such unlikely sisters.”
With its delicate phrasing, softly voiced but insightful portraits, and unsensational handling of the love triangles, Woods’ novel revisits literary myth with restrained empathy.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-312461-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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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