The signature quirks and insouciance are all in place, making this an apt closer for a tough trio of stories from the...
There’s a dead writer in the swimming pool at the opening of Harsch’s final installment of his Driftless trilogy (Billy Verite, 1998, etc.), but this isn’t another Sunset Boulevard: the writer’s friend spends an intensely noirish day retracing the dead man’s movements, until it’s déjà vu all over again.
Since noir and narcissism go hand in hand, it’s no surprise to find that the floating corpse’s name is Rick Harsh (sans “c”); nor is it any great shock that he maintains a running commentary as events unfold. Spleen, the man of action in Book One (The Driftless Zone, 1997), returns to life after a 15-year stint as a working-stiff/reporter and family man by quitting his job to conduct his own investigation into who put a bullet into his buddy’s face; and he starts things off by appropriating the soggy hat from Harsh’s head. Spleen’s own head is full of thoughts about his wife, the Brilliant Redhead, leaving town that day with their two kids to begin teaching philosophy at Vanderbilt—effectively ending their marriage—as he walks through one seedy neighborhood of La Crosse, Wisconsin, after another. Attacked by a dog, he stabs it to death, then is given a lift by his wife’s rich, bitchy friend Candida. The next time she stops for him, he realizes she’s been following him and assaults her. He steals a shirt and shoes from the dead man’s closet, beats up the Fag With No Eyebrows for lying to him about Harsh’s whereabouts, is threatened by a rifle-toting nun, lusts after Mayor Skunk’s loose-limbed secretary, punches transvestite Bette Davis after s/he gets too personal about his past, gets it on with Candida’s daughter, 16-year-old Thrush (who also knew Harsh intimately), and finally winds down a busy day by learning that his relationship with his wife is far worse than he thought.
The signature quirks and insouciance are all in place, making this an apt closer for a tough trio of stories from the bleeding heartland of losers.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2002
ISBN: 1-58642-045-3
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
