Warm-hearted yet unsentimental, a smooth weave of marital and neighborhood dynamics.
A husband is tempted to cheat, and a happy marriage is threatened in the most successful novel yet from Hedges, best known as the author (and later director) of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1991).
The title refers to Brooklyn’s choicest neighborhood, home to alternating narrators Kate and Tim Welch. Young marrieds with two small sons, they love the kid-friendly Heights but are struggling to stay afloat; Tim’s salary teaching history at a local academy just isn’t enough. They’re both refugees from difficult parents, Tim fleeing a tyrannical basketball coach, Kate a hippie mother all drugs and drama. After nine years, their “great, ordinary love” still glows. There’s nothing ordinary, though, about Anna Brody, the newest young mother on the scene and the story’s catalyst. Anna is beautiful, rich and impulsive. Her husband Philip, a self-effacing financial titan, has just bought her the grandest house in the neighborhood, a virtual palace. Her arrival coincides with changes for Tim and Kate. A former employer of Kate’s has offered her a fabulous six-figure position doling out grant money, and Tim has agreed to take a year off, look after the boys and work on his much-delayed dissertation. Hedges has fun showing Tim’s admission into the tightly knit circle of playground mothers and his growing fascination with Anna, less a femme fatale then a troubled soul battling a promiscuous husband. Spontaneously, she makes Tim a one-time offer: a weekend at a Manhattan hotel. Tim goes to church and prays for signs; God is encouraging. Readers by now are so invested in the Welch marriage that the will-he-or-won’t-he? suspense creates page-turning momentum. A parallel story line involves the reappearance of Kate’s old flame, a very bad, very successful TV actor, and a trip to Disney World. Hedges brings a touch of farce into the many twists before the climax.
Warm-hearted yet unsentimental, a smooth weave of marital and neighborhood dynamics.Pub Date: March 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95113-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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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