An honest, biting portrayal of disgrace under pressure, though lacking the finesse needed for a truly polished work.
A second novel from Brown (The Shirt Off His Back, 2001) depicts the perpetually bickering Naylor clan as they prepare to bury their patriarch.
Heartbroken at the news of her father's early death, Glynda makes her way from her budding Los Angeles law practice to her hometown of Baltimore. Waiting for her are oldest sister Renee, sweet baby sister Dawn, nasty sister Colette, Uncle Thomas, and their father's fiancé, Estelle. The narrative, spanning less than a week, is comprised of the sisters' endless quarreling, Uncle Thomas’s colloquial misery (“Where is I gonna find da strength ta be dat brave agin, Sissy”) and the gnawing mystery of Nina Blackford's identity. Named as equal heir with the four sisters, neither family nor friends have heard of Nina, and despite Edwards outstanding reputation, the sisters fear the worst. (To further question what they really know about dear Daddy, Glynda finds a bottle of Viagra in his bathroom.) This is hardly a celebration of family unity—together in grief, the usually agreeable sisters vent their sadness through deep anger aimed at each other: penny-pinching Colette wants to skimp on the funeral, Renee shuns poor Estelle, and Dawn tries to keep Glynda from throttling Colette. Though the endless squabbling becomes tedious, the obscured subtext of coming to terms with the real Eddie Naylor, as opposed to the fantasy father, is a thoughtful one. As the funeral nears, tempers ignite (culminating in a chapel brawl) and the identity of Nina Blackford is revealed. A cast of lively characters—from irritating Roberta, who just has to ride in the limo with the family, to Estelle's transvestite son Jimmy/Jamaica—provides comic relief, but the writing is too broad to elicit any real emotion, even while the tears abound.
An honest, biting portrayal of disgrace under pressure, though lacking the finesse needed for a truly polished work.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-75705-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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