Not an especially artful novel, though a generally absorbing and eventually very moving one. Durban really isn’t one of the...
Ancestral guilt, racial conflict, and the call of the unlived life are the dominant themes of this intricate, slow-moving second novel from the South Carolinian author (All Set About With Fever Trees, 1985; The Laughing Place, 1993).
It all begins in 1989, with a wry panoramic look at the seaport city of Charleston and its colorful history. Then Durban focuses on 60-ish Louisa Hilliard Marion, a brusque spinster who resides in the old Hilliard home: a plantation-owner’s mansion that harbors deep secrets haughtily repressed by Louisa’s elderly mother, a distracted matron who chooses to “remember” the Hilliards’ decent treatment of their slaves. But her mother’s death releases Louisa to look more critically at that past, as she examines both family memorabilia and her own memories. Crucial evidence is found in the recently discovered diary, kept during the 1830s, by Eliza Hilliard, another unmarried dutiful daughter (whose “sacrifices” mockingly mirror Louisa’s). Eliza’s own myopic view of race relations emerges in her self-righteous account of ongoing attempts to humble a proud, recalcitrant slave woman, Diana, herself the ancestor of the Marions’ devoted housemaid Mamie. The story of Mamie’s family also emerges through the consciousness of her granddaughter Evelyn Pope, who politely yet firmly resists Louisa’s efforts to explore their families’ interrelatedness. Meanwhile, the narrative’s complicated structure works only intermittently, and its power steadily diffuses. When Louisa unearths the full truth about the slavewoman Diana’s fate, it’s scarcely more revealing than had been Eliza Hilliard’s earliest disclosures, and the effect is distinctly anticlimactic. The tale’s best moments are in its details: of Louisa’s stoical surrender to loneliness; a harrowing description of a “stranger’s [i.e., yellow] fever” epidemic; and the testimony of aged former slave “Maum Harriette” (“Before freedom came, us been Hilliard labor”), recorded as an oral history document.
Not an especially artful novel, though a generally absorbing and eventually very moving one. Durban really isn’t one of the better novelists around, but her patience and compassion make her fiction very attractive—and worth paying attention to.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26869-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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