Soapy first novel about life, love, passion, and perversion in a decaying mill-town in upstate New York (Mohawk by name). Two cousins, Diana Wood and Anne Younger, are each burdened by the repressiveness of life with their aging, neurotic, and manipulative mothers, and they're also unhappy in love. On double dates way back in high school, things should have miraculously sorted themselves out, but didn't: the beautiful Anne really loves Dan (and vice versa), but Dan marries the good, plain cousin Diana instead (whom he only sort of loves); and the terribly intelligent but doomed-to-disappointment Anne errs by marrying Dallas, an irresponsible and at best half-charming town rake, drinker, and auto mechanic. With these marriages in place, life goes on: Anne and Dallas (after having a son) get divorced; Dan becomes a wheelchair victim and muddles on with Diana (along with her hypochondriacal, money-draining mother); only much later, at book's end, does Diana herself sadly but conveniently die, with the result that Anne and Dan can at last move beyond furtive consummations in front of the late-night fireplace and move away together to Phoenix, Arizona. Before such bittersweet bliss, though, much else happens, and deep, dark secrets emerge, most having to do with a Snopes-like family by name of Grouse. The town's speechless retard, nicknamed Wild Bill (who once upon a time loved Anne from afar and stood mooning under her window), turns out to have been fist-clobbered into retardation by his sleazy father, Rory Grouse, co-worker in the leather mills with Anne's father. There's character-blackmail afoot, it turns out, having to do with the years-long theft of company leather skins by Grouse, and with Anne's father's principled refusal to take part. Anne's draft-dodging and hippy son, in the later Vietnam years, will half-inadvertently reveal the whole mystery—along with a welter of bullets, two dead Grouse brothers (one the emotionally crippled town cop), the dead (and still speechless) Wild Bill, and the frosting-on-the-cake info that Rory Grouse has helped himself to his own granddaughter's sexual favors for quite a while. Workmanlike writing for lovers of the well-atmosphered small-town saga with not a cliche unturned. For those idle hours between daytime soaps.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1986
ISBN: 0679753826
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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