A debut novel describing a troubled young woman’s attempts to sort out the truth of her family’s past. For children, a death in the family is never a simple affair, but some respond to it more vividly than others. Ella lost her father to cancer when she was 15, and she has been a pyromaniac ever since. “What was fire anyway, what was it made of?” she wonders. “Grief, I thought.” First, she set her fires in buckets and bathtubs, but eventually she became a full-fledged arsonist who burned down barns and houses on the sly. Having dropped out of college, Ella now works the front desk at the Linden Hotel in Porter, Indiana, and picks up traveling salesmen by night at the Paradise Lounge. Sometimes she spends the night with them, rarely does she see any man more than once. When her grandfather dies by his own hand (seven years after her father), she decides to track down long-lost Aunt Hanna and break the bad news to her. No one has heard from Hanna for years, and some of the relatives become uneasy when Ella starts asking about her (—Were the fires I—d set some kind of legacy, some fear passed down in the genes?—). In her grandfather’s day, rural Indiana had been Ku Klux Klan territory, and, to some degree, Ella’s haunted by a history even larger than her family’s. When she learns the truth about Hanna, she also discovers that her family has been involved in a deception that she sensed long before she understood. She also realizes, finally, that her impulse to destroy homes is rooted in something deeper than private madness. An intriguing (if overwrought and overwritten) insight into a diseased soul. Purple prose not withstanding (—When the Holy Spirit visited the apostles, and their tongues were in flames, did the voice leave ash in their mouths?—), Steinke has a knack for the macabre.
Pub Date: March 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16150-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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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