Energetic, vivid—and unconvincing: Mom is just too much
Powerfully written if narratively undercharged debut is more a portrait of a monstrous fictional Mommie Dearest (by a remarkably forgiving daughter) than a compelling story of alienation and understanding.
Like many contemporary writers, Stansbury gets the details right, but the characters, however outrageously they behave, seem more concepts-in-costume. The storyline is equally undernourished. The narrator, younger daughter Lucy Taylor, begins her reminisces of life with Mom when still in grade school, as the family's trailer goes off the road en route to Utah, where they are to live Her mother Miriam didn't want to leave California and their home , the picturesque “House on the Hill,” but her father Bob suspected Miriam might have been seeing other men. An understandable fear since Miriam,, self-centered and impulsive, is a Mom who likes to walk on the wild side. Lucy relates next how Miriam, deciding she has Mexican blood, calls herself “Juanita” and works at a local Mexican restaurant for a few days. She also flirts with Mormonism, reads Lucy's diary, and steals whatever she can from restaurants. Bob tries to please Miriam, but Miriam wants more than he can give her. The two divorce, which means Lucy and sister Jen must cope with Mom's lies, machinations, and moves. Miriam keeps moving from California to Alaska, where she ends up as she chases her dreams—as protean as her personality. In Alaska, she claims to have Tlingit blood; follows her unsuitable lovers—two of whom she marries—while along the way getting her Master’s and, incredibly, becoming a psychologist. Lucy, who loves Dad and the orderly life he lives, resents Mom's tastes (ketchup is her vegetable of choice) and her behavior. Still, the now grown-up Lucy, whose own life has been difficult, is amazingly grateful for Mom's zest for living and the lessons she taught her about life.
Energetic, vivid—and unconvincing: Mom is just too muchPub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0978-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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