The mystery here never overwhelms the charm of Betsy’s story, a comfortable balance between seriousness and sweet-natured...
Second-novelist Eisenberg (The War at Home, 2002) follows a neurotic woman as she searches for her father—presumed dead for 20 years.
Nearly 40, Betsy Ross Vogel is at a crossroads: she can stay in her dingy New York apartment, keep her uninspiring job at a mediocre magazine, and continue to thwart her lovely boyfriend’s attempts to sweep her away. Or, she could let said lovely boyfriend sweep her away—to Guatemala, in fact. David, a photographer with a social conscience, has been assigned to Central America and wants to take Betsy to the happily-ever-after she deserves. So she says yes; after all, little holds her in New York: her brother Tom works in Africa for famine relief, her mother is institutionalized and doesn’t even recognize Betsy, and her father has long been dead. Just a quick trip to the cemetery to see his grave (she’s managed to put it off for 20 years)—and, lo and behold, he doesn’t have one, and, with a little more snooping, Betsy finds that he may not even be dead. Sam Vogel was a union leader dedicated to the rights of the “little man” and targeted for his un-American activities. In and out of prison (for refusing to sign a loyalty oath) and sometimes on the lam during Betsy’s childhood, he was righteous, bigger than life, and not just a little selfish, sacrificing the sanity of his fragile wife and the upbringing of his children to further the cause. When Ma was “sick” and Daddy in prison, the children were cared for by an assortment of relatives and like-minded activists and were tormented by other children. Although David fears that Betsy will never join him in Guatemala, she has to find her father. It’s plausible that he would fake his own death, but not to have contacted his daughter in the last 20 years—what kind of father is that? Indeed.
The mystery here never overwhelms the charm of Betsy’s story, a comfortable balance between seriousness and sweet-natured humor.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9679520-8-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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