Wearying.
Bickering couple fight about everything.
Lisa Diodetto, the gutsy heroine of Pink Slip (1999), is five years older and not a lot happier. For one thing, she and hubby Eben Strauss can’t conceive a second child—not that she’s absolutely sure she wants another, since the first has adenoids. Little Danny’s loud snoring isn’t the only thing that keeps her tossing and turning at night—practical Ebb just doesn’t think much of the novel she’s writing. Okay, it is about a contemporary marriage on the rocks, but that doesn’t mean it’s their marriage. Especially since Ebb is the newly promoted Vice President of Internal Relations at his company. He used to be halfway across the country every time she ovulated; but since he’s been home so much more, routine make-a-baby sex reminds her only of the crushing disappointment of secondary infertility. Just because stay-at-home mom Lisa secretly dreams of becoming a published author doesn’t mean she wants out. Maybe she needs a project. Maybe buying a house would be a good idea. The real-estate agent is a purring blond named Cynthia Farquhar. Cynthia couldn’t possibly be interested in a middle-aged stick-in-the-mud like Ebb, could she? Not when Ebb’s tendency to constipation is explored in telling detail. Lisa broods over things like misplaced toenail clippings and the way colorblind Ebb always picks out the worst tie. Maybe that phone call from a New York literary agent will cheer her up. They meet in Manhattan for sushi, and she’s utterly put off by the way he harasses the waiter for half a portion of eel, instead of being man enough to order the whole squiggly thing. Not to mention he’s a total phony and asks her to rewrite the predictable ending of her novel. She might as well go home and keep obsessing about belches, burps, poops, farts, and turds (lots of puerile scatological humor, folks). Maybe Ebb will even get off the pot and tell her he still loves her.
Wearying.Pub Date: June 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-33584-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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