A melancholy, earnest study of friendship.
A longtime journalist looks back solemnly at his first job and one cryptic woman’s influence on him.
Ricky, the narrator of Karaim’s second novel (If Men Were Angels, 1999), opens this story grimly: he’s learned that Anna, a former co-worker, has killed herself by drinking bleach in a motel room. Flash back to young Ricky, fresh out of college and quickly elevated to editor-in-chief of a small-town weekly newspaper in central North Dakota. The job itself isn’t especially demanding—he and his small staff cover fires, floods, and festivals, with the occasional dash of mild civic scandal. Anna is the real focus of his investigative skills, a puzzle he can’t solve but keeps coming back to: a single mother of two, she delivers the occasional tart line to blunt the young man’s arrogance while keeping her past carefully concealed. (Why did she leave her husband? What’s with the scars on her wrists?) The two engage in something of a flirtation, but Karaim is careful not to frame this as a love story or even a woman-who-got-away story. Anna is a study in depression and grief, and as the story moves along, the reasons for those dark emotions become starker and deeper. Anna’s storm clouds, combined with Karaim’s elegant depictions of the wide, empty landscapes on the edge of the Badlands (“the spot in our national geography where the Midwest becomes the West” ), give the novel an overall bittersweet feel—he’s elegiac about youth and simpler times for newspapers. But the novel's structure is overly manicured in ways that make its emotional effects seem forced, from the carefully timed reveals of Anna’s past to the dry subplots about locals and friends’ relationships. Anna’s sadness is sympathetically but repetitively handled, leading to a fate whose end we already learned on Page 1.
A melancholy, earnest study of friendship.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-60850-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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