A readable comic meditation on human frailty.
Rock star and soap actor–turned-author Springfield (Late, Late at Night, 2010) debuts with fiction best classified as black comedy.
This novel is remarkably creative, for no other reason than Springfield boggles with countless euphemisms for male reproductive organs, masturbation and the act of sexual procreation. Sex, comedy and metaphysics pose a conundrum: Who listens when God speaks? Bobby Cotton for one—hapless nerd, Los Angeles sound editor, recently divorced cuckold. Next it’s Alice Young, reluctant religious novitiate, and, finally, Lexington Vargas, prominent Mexican doctor’s son and now redeemed gangster. Bobby’s life has been an "obsession with the female species and the whole, odd tie to organized religion." Shuttled aside by quarreling parents, Bobby deeply loved his sister, lost first to mental illness and then cancer, the narrative element most emotionally affecting. Fumbling about after his divorce, Bobby steals a self-help book called Magnificent Vibration. Inside is a penciled note: "1-800-Call-God." Bobby dials and becomes convinced he’s speaking to God, who in fact prefers to be called Omnipotent Supreme Being but will settle for Arthur. OSB has "a rather incongruous and off-putting sense of humor," which means Bobby complies when told to get a cup of coffee. There, he meets Alice and then Lexington. Both have a copy of the book, and inside each copy is the same telephone number. While Lexington seems flat and present mainly as a plot catalyst, Springfield can write believable characters, his best being Bobby and Alice. The narrative bounces from the present to Bobby’s examination of his life and then to conversations with God, who is upset with war and pollution in the universe, all ending in Scotland with Alice, the reluctant nun. Springfield delivers a buckle-your-seat-belts ride, referencing the Loch Ness monster, superheroes, schlock films, Christian fundamentalism, sexual repression, the Pacific garbage patch and existentialist fatalism.
A readable comic meditation on human frailty.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5890-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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.
