Pleasant narrative, but a first novel even so that lacks any punch.
A belated coming-of-ager about a woman in her 30s who returns home to Florence, Ohio, after a stint abroad to confront her family’s not-very-secret secrets.
After Merle Winslow’s mother Joannie dies in a car accident, 13-year-old Merle and her younger brother Olin are raised by their father Ernest and grandmother Lettie. At 18, Merle discovers that her mother was with a lover when she died. She stews over this information for four years before running off to England, where she hooks up with the decadent son of a British diplomat and works in the pornography-publishing business. The story opens ten years later, when Merle returns to Florence after her boyfriend proposes a sexual deviation beyond her limit. Back in Ohio, she finds that Olin, after a successful career in marketing, is now trying to become a stand-up comic, while Ernest has a new fiancé very different from Joannie—and Lettie is still feisty and difficult the way cute grandmothers in a novel of this sort always are. Soon Merle has met, through Lettie, a good-looking pilot named Frank. While Merle’s story is predictable and her “high-strung” zaniness kind of bland, the flashbacks to Ernest and Joannie’s romance have genuine resonance. The two meet in the ’60s in Oklahoma, where he studies unsuccessfully to be an engineer and she’s a precocious 17-year-old working at her father’s cheap motel. Both desperately unhappy, they cling to each other and elope, but, back in Florence, their marriage takes a major hit when Joannie and baby Merle are photographed outside the site of a student bombing at the local college where Ernest works. Although Joannie wasn’t actually involved in the bombing, Ernest loses his job and Joannie begins to drink. Unfortunately, Dalton doesn’t focus on them long enough once the marriage’s dissolution sets in, and readers are stuck with Merle and her inevitable happy ending.
Pleasant narrative, but a first novel even so that lacks any punch.Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-7018-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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