The opener here — one of two stories which goes by the name of "Useful Fictions" — is by Peter Tarnopol and about Nathan Zuckerman who is of course Peter Tarnopol who is of course Philip Roth recording his life as a man already only too recognizable as that of the mensch manque — the Jewish boy from New Jersey who was such a public nuisance in the public library and such a misfit in the Army and who became "the golden boy of American literature" (1959 — hello, goodbye) and then went on to teach in a midwestern college where he became hopelessly entrammeled with two women. I.e. — the basis of what will be shamefully appropriated as useful non-fiction (a case study) by Dr. Spielvogel who also reappears and considers him "among the top young narcissists in the arts." Thus a series of reprises finds Peter Tarnopol dividing his time almost equally between his analysis and his writing and Maureen who trapped him into marriage (that urine specimen she took off a black woman in Tompkins Park) — Maureen who beleaguers him and berates him ("Find'em-fuck'em and forget'em Flaubert") through the years in which she refuses him a divorce although there's Susan, popping pills "like M & M's" but cooking him marvelous gourmet meals and waiting — waiting — waiting like another one of those ballbreaking Clytemnestras. . . This then, baldly and barely basted together, is Roth's very own kind of Jewish intellectual slapshtick, worked and reworked from earlier sources and all going back to that primal motherlode of neurosis which has led him through other areas of "erotic anthropology" to further difficulties entailing either making it or letting go. However familiar or strenuous, there is that bravura and this is the funniest book he's written since Portnoy. So Nu, "Let's begin.
Pub Date: June 3, 1974
ISBN: 067974827X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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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