One of those almost too-clever and erudite novels about identity and the nature of women that challenge the head, but neglect the heart, by novelist and philosophy teacher Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem, The Late Summer Passions of a Woman of Mind). Hedda, a writer of fierce feminist novels whose protagonists are known as JAW's—''Jewish Angry Women''—has fled to Maine to write her next novel in undisturbed isolation. Up in the wooden tower of the house, she begins to write a story about two nameless sisters but is interrupted by calls from her own sister in New York, the much divorced and analyzed Stella. Stella uses these calls to repeat unfavorable reviews of Hedda's novels and complain about her analyst. The two sisters are not close, but they are linked by a common childhood of misery and maternal cruelty. As Hedda struggles with this novel, quite unlike her others, she finds Jamesian characters and style, as well as William and Henry James themselves, taking over her story. Dr. Austin Sloper (Washington Square) appears and calls in William James to investigate the two spinster sisters (now named). Alice Bonnet, plain and unimaginative, is worried about the unwomanly intellectual pursuits of her sister, brilliant and beautiful Vivianna, who studies the stars from a wooden tower. Identities are confused; parallel plots unfold; Stella begins writing successful detective stories; and the three Jameses—William, Henry and Alice—add further commentary, but, meanwhile, Hedda herself is descending into a madness provoked by her realization that ``personal identity is, even while we live, a plumped-up phantasm, a frightened fiction...to keep the wider sea from breaking through.'' Fortunately, sisterly help is at hand. Witty, learned, and nicely satirical, Goldstein's latest should offer more than a chance for the literate to identify allusions and literary figures, but it doesn't. And Hedda and Stella, whose story should hold it all together, get lost in the brilliant throng. Disappointing.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83556-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
An effective, uniformly controlled collection of ten stories from the author of, most recently, Cat's Eye (1989). Gathered here are pieces previously appearing in top short- story forums—The New Yorker, Granta, Saturday Night, Playboy—providing an excellent sampling of high-proof Atwood. Virtually all the pieces focus on the lives of women equivocally connected to the men around them. In "Wilderness Tips," a middle-aged woman is bluntly confronted with her husband's infidelity. "Hairball," the most disturbing here, involves the dissolution of a woman's affair with a married man; the otherwise naturalistic posture of the story is powerfully undercut by the presence of a removed tumor that the young lady keeps in a jar, eventually sending it, neatly wrapped, to her lover's wife. In "True Trash," a young woman encounters a youth who is still unaware that he had impregnated a camp employee many years earlier. And "Hack Wednesday" revolves around a disgruntled journalist brought, whimsically, to the brink of an affair before she backs off—not from any pangs of conscience but out of lethargic concern for the work involved in carrying it off. Like Alice Munro, Atwood has a talent for serving up the nuances of bourgeois Ontario culture, but with Atwood the ingredients are boiled down into a stronger and much more acerbic brew. The author's trademark smirk behind the economical prose can be wearying over the course of an entire collection, but taken separately, the pieces here are solid evidence of the author in full form. Pure Atwood.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1991
ISBN: 1841957984
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
Originally published in German in 1962 and touted more recently as a feminist's Robinson Crusoe, this somber classic from prize-winner Haushofer chronicles the experiences of a (nameless) woman cut off from her familiar city ways in a remote hunting lodge, after Armageddon has snuffed out all life in the world beyond. With the woman's diary of activities during the first two years of isolation as foundation, the story assumes the shape and flavor of a journal. Saved from instant death by a transparent, apparently indestructible wall enclosing a substantial area of forest and alpine meadow, the woman finds relief from her isolation in companionship offered by a dog, a cat, kittens, and a cow and her calf, making them into a family that she cares for faithfully and frets over incessantly with each season's new challenges. Crops of potatoes, beans, and hay are harvested in sufficient quantity to keep all alive, with deer providing occasional meat for the table, but the satisfaction of having survived long winters and a halcyon summer is undone by a second sudden and equally devastating catastrophe, which triggers the need in her to tell her story. Although heavy with the repetition of daily chores, the account is also intensely introspective, probing as deeply into the psyche of the woman as it does into her world, which circumstances have placed in a new light. Subtly surreal, by turns claustrophobic and exhilarating, fixated with almost religious fervor on banal detail, this is a disturbing yet rewarding tale in which survival and femininity are strikingly merged. Not for macho readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-939416-53-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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