Always smart and intermittently very funny, but the shifts in tone, leaps in chronology and changes of focus can induce...
Madcap novel of ideas, careening between the hilarious and the ponderous.
Goldstein (Betraying Spinoza, 2009, etc.), whose fiction and biographies alike reflect her background in philosophy, has certainly chosen a timely topic. Protagonist Cass Seltzer soared from academic obscurity to bestselling renown with The Varieties of Religious Illusion, in which he attempts to refute every basis for belief in God without belittling those who accept them, thus distinguishing himself in the contemporary debate over faith and reason as “the atheist with a soul.” For the prior two decades, Cass had “all but owned the psychology of religion, but only because nobody else wanted it.” His book’s success brings him a write-your-own-ticket offer from Harvard and an even greater reward: the love of the beautiful, formidably intelligent Lucinda Mandelbaum, whose work in the field of game theory he can barely understand. His success also brings him the enmity of his mentor, Jonas Elijah Klapper, who might be a genius but is definitely a messianic crackpot. “The Klap” kept another protégé from receiving his doctorate for more than 13 years and once proposed that Seltzer switch his dissertation topic to “the hermeneutics of the potato kugel.” Within the novel, intellectual slapstick collides with romantic farce, as the lovesick professor discovers that “romantic infatuation can be a form of religious delusion, too.” It builds to a public debate over God’s existence that isn’t going to make anyone forget Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and concludes with the titular “36 arguments” that Seltzer’s book refutes, filled with such hair-splitting redundancy that one suspects his was one of those bestsellers bought in great numbers by people who never actually got around to reading it.
Always smart and intermittently very funny, but the shifts in tone, leaps in chronology and changes of focus can induce whiplash.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37818-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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