Well-written though oft-told, and interrupted much too often by a confused spirituality.
Jan Campbell is an excellent student and devoted churchgoer—until she scandalizes the Baptist congregation by saying “nobody should hold a child back from God. . . .”
Aunt Ada agrees in principle, though she’s never uttered more than a quiet amen in church. Jan loves to listen to Ada’s stories of life in rural Mississippi, before the family migrated to the mostly black Chicago suburb they live in now. Her father Charles, a plainspoken dirt farmer down south, isn’t quite good enough for her mother Jessie, who used to work as a hired glamour girl, distracting the marks in a cardsharp’s traveling game. None of this makes much sense to Jan, who listens for answers in the bittersweet lyrics of jazz singers and grows up wondering about the mysteries of life—and love. Her first lover is Don Obatunde, who grew up in the projects with his heroin-addict mother, turned to crime at a young age, and became a sculptor in jail. Upon his release, wealthy white women helped get his work into galleries and shows, and Don showed his thanks by bedding them all. When Jan discovers that he’s involved with another woman, she thinks how nice it would be if she could commune with the family spirits. Her long-dead grandmother Hannah is waiting, but Jan can’t hear her words of advice (yet). Though Hannah’s “earth time” is over, her spirit moves freely between this world and the Hereafter, offering wise counsel in a woo-woo language that doesn’t sound like anything from Mississippi (it’s noted that Hannah is part Cherokee, as if to explain the cryptic comments). Eventually, Jan lands a great job at a jazz station, and, having gotten a new love, responsible Phil, figures out that the voice she hears in her head doesn’t mean she’s crazy—just communing with family ghosts.
Well-written though oft-told, and interrupted much too often by a confused spirituality.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-75809-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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