An oddly affectionate portrait of disaster relief that deftly mocks the indemnity mindset of a culture under siege.
A mathematician with a combination of unusual gifts sees the worst coming in this strange rumination on catastrophe prediction.
Mitchell Zukor is the protagonist of this open-ended exercise in paranoia by Rich (The Mayor’s Tongue, 2008, etc.). The novel opens with a slight remembrance of the brilliant young analyst by a college classmate, both part of a generation permanently scarred by an earthquake that completely razes Seattle. Relatively unfazed but simmering at his core, Zukor does the responsible thing and takes a job as a financial analyst at a NYC firm. But soon after, he meets the mysterious Alec Charnoble of FutureWorld, a company that advises its clients against potential disasters that would inevitably affect their markets—a perfect platform for Zukor’s vigilant intellect. Mitchell also initiates a nonromantic, epistolary relationship with Elsa Bruner, a classmate who has as thoroughly rejected the urban spectrum as Zukor has immersed himself in it, fleeing to a remote retreat in Maine. “It’s curiosity that’s my problem,” Zukor writes to her. “I wish I didn’t want to know the first thing about plate tectonics or nuclear war, but I do. So I learn more. And the more I learn, the more I find there is to fear.” His worst fears come to life when he successfully predicts that a massive hurricane will wipe out New York City, sending Zukor and his protégé into the chaos. Zukor’s impossibly accurate prediction makes him a cult figure of sorts, the visionary held hostage by his own fear. In an already uneasy age, Rich zeroes in on our collective anxiety with a story of wild-eyed ingenuity that is both meditative and propulsive, often simultaneously. With its fits of paranoia and eerily prescient scenario, this book is not comfortable reading, but it’s also nearly impossible to put down.
An oddly affectionate portrait of disaster relief that deftly mocks the indemnity mindset of a culture under siege.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-22424-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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