Longer and rather more drawn out than it needs to be, but a good account of friendship and loss, freshly narrated with a...
The slow emotional thaw of a 53-year-old widow who manages to reorder her life post-husband, thanks to a troubled granddaughter and an embittered AIDS patient.
Center stage in Manfredi’s first novel (stories: Where Love Leaves Us, 1994) is Boston medical technician Anna, once a happily married woman whose life revolved for years around her husband Hugh and their daughter Poppy. But now, with Hugh several years dead of cancer and Poppy living in Alaska, Anna has to build a new world for herself. So she moves to a new house and takes up some new activities, agreeing to help coordinate a support group for AIDS patients. Then, after 12 years’ estrangement, Anna gets a phone call from Poppy asking if she can come to visit with her husband Marvin and their daughter Flynn. Anna is a bit nervous about the reunion with her daughter, but it turns out to be a false alarm: Poppy never shows. But Marvin does, bringing Flynn in tow and explaining that he and Poppy have broken up. So Anna takes them in and tries to provide a stable home for Flynn, a charming and eccentric ten-year-old who talks to spirits, has perfect pitch, and believes that India is a planet. Anna makes the mistake of bringing Marvin along to her support group, where he meets and begins an affair with her young assistant Christine. The group comes to play an increasingly large role in Anna’s domestic life after she connects with a patient named Jack. Caustic and deeply angry, Jack softens with time and eventually becomes Anna’s close friend. Together, this oddball collection of emotional cripples manages to work their way through the thickets of everyday life with good humor and a decent hope of survival.
Longer and rather more drawn out than it needs to be, but a good account of friendship and loss, freshly narrated with a minimum of stereotypes and some sharply drawn characters.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-59-1
Page Count: 344
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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