A compelling, smart, no-holds-barred story committed equally to verisimilitude and compassion.
With tortured, unflinching clarity, second-novelist Basch (Degrees of Love, 1998) charts the redemptive downfall of a small-town reverend.
Jordanna Nash, 43, has taken up her calling at Hutchinson Congregational Church in Connecticut, following the ousting of the adulterous former minister. Jordanna is unorthodox in many ways, from her jewelry to her “dangerously tall” stature, but not in her unshakable faith. Her sermons are mostly inspirational, and on the surface all seems well. Yet the disappearance and apparent suicide of the depressed June Nearing, whom Jordanna had been helping, sparks controversy. An opportunistic reporter, questioning the validity of spiritual counseling as an alternative to academically verified therapy, gets the town talking. Jordanna, a vivid and intelligent Job-figure, is soon tested to her limits. Her resentful sister Abby is of no real comfort (Abby’s familial dialogues are the only real slowdowns in the narrative), and June’s relatives have consulted with an attorney, causing rumors of a lawsuit. Meanwhile, Tara Sears, a juvenile member of the congregation and its Senior Pilgrim Fellowship, is pregnant and wants an abortion. Jordanna is constantly reminded of the deaths of her own two children, both stillborn, and she’s plagued by back problems that act up during moments of extreme crisis, symbolically detailing her progressive loss of faith. Her professorial husband, Daniel, returns from an Auckland dig with his new graduate-student girlfriend in tow, wanting a divorce. God seems to have abandoned Jordanna. She seeks moral support from her longtime spiritual mentor Chip, who has a stroke at her feet. Such plagues could easily seem contrived, but Basch rarely takes the easy way out. When the church’s aptly named Prudential Board, sort of God’s p.r. group, decides to oust Jordanna, using her divorce as precedent, she’s placed in her final compromising position. Will she run or fight? In the end, her choices have to do mainly with human empathy and sacrifice.
A compelling, smart, no-holds-barred story committed equally to verisimilitude and compassion.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05768-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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