Goldstein expands on a story in her collection, Strange Attractors (1992), in this lively exploration of the ways chance intermingles with determinism in human lives. Sasha Saunders' beloved granddaughter is about to have a baby, and Sasha is so angry she could spit. But has Phoebe married outside her religion to deserve such derision? On the contrary: In the face of her grandmother's determined bohemianism, the delightful mathematics professor Phoebe (first seen in ``The Geometry of Soap Bubbles and Impossible Love'') has gone and married a stable Jewish computer wunderkind and settled happily into a sleepy New Jersey suburb, firmly believing that she can thus ensure a safe and happy future for her family. To explain how erroneous such a conviction can be, Sashaand the authormust go back several generations to the tiny Polish shtetl where Sasha was born, where nothing unexpected ever happened, and where Sasha's beloved sister, Fraydel, became so bored that she killed herself. Stunned, the family drifted to Warsaw, where Sasha found her calling in the chance- (or ``mazel-'') obsessed avant-garde theater. Had Fraydel not died, Sasha would never have discovered the stage, and if her grief hadn't forced her to seek comfort from Maurice, one of the theater's hangers-on, Sasha's daughter, Chloe, would never have been born. And had WW II not brought Chloe to New York, Chloe may have never conceived her own child with a professor she hardly knew, and Phoebe herself, with eyes so like Fraydel's, might never have existed. So how, her grandmother wonders, can Phoebe placidly await the birth of a son with all the confidence of her shtetl ancestors in life's predictability? Still, chance has given Phoebe a gift for finding happiness, so who's to say she's wrong? Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem, 1983, etc.) draws heavily on the themes and rhythms of Yiddish folklore while offering her own sparkling wit and philosophical insight, as always, along the way.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85648-7
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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