Ambitions this outsized need more coherent themes and ideas.
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Assia Weevil get reimagined by the author of Ice Age (stories: 2000), who also stirs a fictional Robert Anderson and several New York catastrophes into an overstuffed first novel.
The author begins intriguingly, with his alter ego on the roof of Columbia University’s Dodge Hall observing an unidentified tumult whose meaning will become clear only at the close. Seguing into his obsession with Plath, “for many years a spokesperson for the alienated, the lovelorn, the vengeful, the suicidal,” narrator Robert Anderson claims that Plath’s poems and Hughes’s “forged my identity . . . and, incidentally, they ruined my life.” It’s a good hook, and subsequent chapters exploring the couple’s psyches the day of Plath’s 1963 suicide lead readers to wonder where all this is going. Unfortunately, though, the narrator’s adventures from the 1960s through 2001 have no convincing connection with the Plath-Hughes-Weevil triangle beyond a general atmosphere of doom. The author, born in 1964, makes his namesake 18 years older: Robert Anderson describes the ’68 Columbia riots, the ’77 blackout, Times Square at its sleazy late-’70s ebb, and the AIDS epidemic all in vivid prose, but the excitement of the language can’t disguise the generic quality of the experiences. Weevil is the most interesting character here, shakily sustaining the affair with Hughes while realizing that his wife has chained him to her forever with her death. But this is familiar territory, and so are the narrator’s romances with an idiosyncratic photographer and a junkie prostitute. The spiraling time frame is clear enough but leads nowhere thematically. A contrived climax brings Robert to the World Trade Center on 9/11/01, then mingles that apocalypse with narratives of Hughes’s 1969 trip to New York (when the author has him encounter Robert) and Assia’s suicide the same year—topped off by placing Robert’s long-lost love aboard one of the hijacked planes. It’s way, way too much.
Ambitions this outsized need more coherent themes and ideas.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45410-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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