A woman’s life changes when her friend develops Alzheimer’s disease and unknowingly reveals a closely kept secret.
Dara, Tommie and Meg have been best friends since childhood. Over the decades, they’ve seen each other through marriages, children and hard times: Dara’s breast cancer, Tommie’s divorce and the death of Tommie’s only child, Jessica, who was 22 and pregnant when she died from leukemia. Dara is at first reluctant to acknowledge what’s happening to Tommie; she finds herself enjoying a trip to Las Vegas, especially cherishing “the sensation…that she still seemed to be moving in an unreal world where nothing bad could happen.” When Tommie lets slip a long-buried secret—Jerry, Dara’s husband, was actually Jessica’s father—Dara thinks: “This must be what it feels like to die.” Hurt and reeling, Dara flees to Las Vegas, where she becomes friends with a young dancer who puts her up. Eventually, she finds work as a waitress and meets a charming widower. As she reconsiders her life, Dara will have to decide what she really wants and where she belongs. Paul (Sins of the Empress, 2013, etc.) deftly sketches this quickly moving story, impressively differentiating the three best friends. As the novel begins, for example, Dara plays bridge because all her friends do, even though she hates it; she’s so genteel that she “had never said ‘sucks’ out loud,” but by the end of the novel, when Dara is considering returning home, she’s able to tell Meg, “I hate bridge, and the book club sucks.” Paul gives Dara an interesting foil in Margaret/Amber/Tatiana, the name-changing young dancer who gives her a place to stay and challenges some preconceptions; her relationship with lonely widower Hal is also delicately handled. Paul adds nuance and feeling to what could be a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy.
Although the motif of a fed-up middle-aged woman taking off to consider her options isn’t new, Paul delivers a thoughtful take on it.
Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497515598
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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