The downward spiral of these lives—everything that could go wrong does (even Ruby’s sewing machine is stolen)—becomes a bit...
A Pushcart Editor's Prize nominee traces three generations of a hard-luck African-American family striving for happiness and normalcy in Oakland, California.
As his title implies, Dry’s characters—seamstress Ruby Washington, her half-brother Easton, daughter Lida, and Lida’s two sons, Love and Li’l Pit—are in a state of near-constant flux. In the opening scene, Ruby and Easton arrive out west, in 1959, after coming by bus from their native South Carolina. The scene is reprised throughout and is echoed in the restless wanderings of the others: of Easton, a gifted artist drawn into the civil rights movement and a disappointing romance with a white colleague; of Lida, who lapses into drug-addiction and prostitution, devoured inside by the terrible secret of her uncle’s sexual abuse; of Love, whose violent childhood leaves him scarred as he struggles against social workers, “gangstas,” and an uncaring white world; and of Li’l Pit, a feral man-child bound either for prison or early death. Dry, who has a background working with emotionally disturbed children, is compelling in his depiction of this milieu. The family’s moral compass and center is the strong and devout Ruby, who maintains both the household through which the others drift and the living memories of the family’s rural origins. The narrative jumps abruptly back and forth in time—offering much black history along the way—although each chapter begins helpfully with the date and the present ages of the characters. Though he has a convincing feel for period and a seasoned eye for detail, Dry sometimes writes in a manner almost scriptlike as the story progresses through short, vivid scenes and sharp exchanges of dialogue.
The downward spiral of these lives—everything that could go wrong does (even Ruby’s sewing machine is stolen)—becomes a bit dizzying after 400 pages. But Leaving is rescued by the characters themselves, haunting and well-drawn. A strong debut.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28331-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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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