Deeply unflattering but unsurprising picture of go-go finance and its practitioners; they’re mainly male, but Frankie is no...
Quickly addicted to the adrenalin and the machismo of futures trading, an ambitious young woman’s life spirals out of control.
In late-1990s London, hard-nosed Frankie Cavanaugh lands her dream job as a trader in the open pit of the futures exchange. The setup is promising, in a Bret Easton Ellis way. Frankie, a tough girl who lost her mother young, is pretty, hard-partying, a hint reckless. Trading is a profession custom-made for a personality like hers, but it’s also perilous. Monaghan (The Killing Jar, 2007) captures the pell-mell euphoria of the trading floor and makes the reader believe that those who thrive here might have trouble resisting other rushes—like heavy drinking, drug-fueled nightclub binges, sexual gamesmanship, fisticuffs, thrill crimes. Frankie knows well the costs of getting involved with her boss: Newlywed American Tom is both good-looking and sexually rapacious, and although it’s not quite clear whether the reader is meant to find him appealing or monstrous, the balance tips heavily to the latter. As the affair intensifies, Frankie and Tom have to work harder to sate their taste for danger. They move from prankish shoplifting to more brazen thefts, and eventually to risking their lives for kicks; they graduate from wine to vodka-and-Red-Bull, then to cocaine, Ecstasy and finally LSD. The book founders in what Frankie calls her “not-so-hidden shallows.” These shallows aren’t just poorly hidden; they’re all there is. Frankie is thoughtless, self-absorbed and cruel, and so is virtually everyone else she encounters. Monaghan doesn’t help by introducing several preposterous plot twists of the made-for-movie-adaptation variety.
Deeply unflattering but unsurprising picture of go-go finance and its practitioners; they’re mainly male, but Frankie is no innocent led to the slaughter.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8906-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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