An admirable tour de force of imagery and linguistic pyrotechnics, but the endless talk about passion eventually pours cold...
In this brief, fiercely erotic novel, a woman who appears enveloped in conventional domesticity clings to memories of the dangerously bohemian life she shared with her former lover.
The opening scene of graphic sadomasochistic sex with Mickey, her former lover, that Bird is dreaming, or perhaps remembering, is interrupted by a ringing phone that wakes her in the present. Rapturous if sometimes-troubling memories of Mickey continue to slam-dance into her daily routine. As the day unfolds, Bird gets her boy off to school, nurses the baby, gives breakfast to her husband—for whom she feels mildly irritated affection—and attempts desultory housekeeping. All the while, in nonlinear fits and starts, she relives her affair with Mickey: the unheated apartment in pre-gentrified Brooklyn; the “junk” they snorted; their violent sex; Mickey’s fall down an elevator shaft. Neither Bird’s pregnancy nor Mickey’s marriage proposal came to fruition. After taking a haphazard cross-country trip and meeting an even more degraded, desperate couple, Bird and Mickey returned to New York and broke up. While she remains addicted to the idea of Mickey and the squalid passion he offered, she is ambivalent. She loves her little boy and infant daughter with fierce maternal protectiveness. Although Bird enjoys losing herself in reveries of Mickey, she tells herself she doesn’t want her son to be like him or her daughter to love a boy like him too long. Given that Bird recently cracked a pelvis in childbirth, readers may wonder if the novel is actually a literary riff on postpartum depression. Holland (Swim for the Little One First, 2012, etc.) gives Bird’s past with Mickey a visceral immediacy but keeps her present life in New England abstract and slightly out of focus.
An admirable tour de force of imagery and linguistic pyrotechnics, but the endless talk about passion eventually pours cold water over the initial fiery energy, turning a novel about heightened emotions into a trudge.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-564-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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