A lively but disappointing parody of Hollywood life and its family values, Craig’s first novel pits an over-the-hill alcoholic action-hero against his illegitimate teenaged son, who’s come from the hinterland to claim his birthright. Charlie West’s career may be headed south, but he still carries on as if all L.A. were at his feet. Just behind the bluster, however, lurk insecurity and paranoia, and these (combined with his substance abuse) make him a potential conflagration waiting for a match. That’s supplied by young Matt Ravendahl, who arrives on the bus from rural Washington with scrapbooks full of clippings about the father he’s never met. Long ago Charlie had checked into a discreet detox center run by Matt’s grandmother, and while his stay didn’t do much to dry him out, it did bring him into contact with Sadie, who seduced him and was left carrying his child. Matt now has questions only his dad can answer (Sadie has died in an accident years before), but he doesn’t know quite how to pose them. Sneaking into Charlie’s house isn’t the answer (though he tries that), so Matt turns to his older half-sister, Ava—who doesn’t even know she has a sibling until Matt appears at her yard sale. Once the shock wears off, she cooks up a plan to bring father and son together, but Charlie’s booze-fueled, incendiary response makes toast of it. So Matt steals Charlie away in the old man’s RV and drives back to Washington in hopes of having a heart-to-heart when his dad sobers up. Once they arrive, though, Charlie panics at the memories, and a tense standoff ensues, ending only after both Matt and Ava put their lives on the line. The process is amusing, but what’s left once the rich and famous have their glamour stripped away isn’t much, and the story suffers further from its improbable, Hollywood-style finale.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15658-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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