Self-conscious analysis of a cooling marriage fails to work as a metaphor for world affairs.
Literary fiction picks apart politics and a marriage, often confusing the two.
Sarah is a nervous wreck. A homebound writer who is having trouble naming her novel-in-progress, she’s afraid of being alone, of terrorism and of her husband Michael leaving her, a legitimate possibility. The couple have each been previously married, and two years earlier Michael had “announced his intention to leave,” reconsidering only after looking around his “beloved backyard” and realizing “we’d lose EVERYTHING.” The realization that her marriage stands on such rocky, materialistic ground has prompted Sarah to censor her speech, if not her actions, and although she suspects Michael is having an affair, rather than confront him she invents excuses to follow him on a business trip. The truth she uncovers about Michael—that he has a grown daughter from an early liaison—turns out to be more troublesome than a simple affair. His daughter, the exotic, beautiful Camila, is oddly seductive and seems to harbor ill will toward Sarah; her absent mother, Magdalena, is another threat. Sarah’s one good friend, Rachel, is undergoing treatment for colon cancer, but while Sarah accompanies her to chemotherapy and doctor’s appointments, Rachel throws herself into the mystery of Michael’s earlier life, spurring Sarah on to research Michael’s time in the Peace Corps and the mysterious Magdalena’s subsequent, perhaps violent life. Ireland (Ana Imagined, 2000) makes connections between the personal and political, showing how Sarah externalizes her insecurities into a near-constant fear of terrorist attacks. But her protagonist is so fearful and rigid that her first-person narration is annoyingly choppy. Much of the dialogue comes in non sequiturs, and too many highbrow references stand in for characterization. Ultimately so narcissistic she believes she killed her first, Vietnam-era fiancé because she “hadn’t protested the war,” she never garners sympathy.
Self-conscious analysis of a cooling marriage fails to work as a metaphor for world affairs.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56512-540-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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