Brilliant slices of life don’t quite cohere into a satisfying whole.
Cohen (Inspired Sleep, 2001, etc.) explores the emptiness beneath the placid surface of modern life.
These barbarians aren’t anything terribly special—they are, after all, amateurs—but they do have their quirks, caprices and hang-ups. Teddy Hastings is the principal of a New England middle school. He has health problems—could it be cancer?—and he gets jailed briefly for taking nearly-nude pictures of his teenage daughter Mimi for a photography course. After his brief but embarrassing incarceration, he takes off for Africa, chasing his errant daughter Danny, whose junior year abroad morphed into a desire to see the world. Dilettante Oren Pierce, a modern man who’s tried a little of everything but can’t settle down or commit to anything, begins teaching at Hastings’ school; while Teddy is in Africa, Oren has an affair with his wife Gail. In one hilarious episode, Oren covers a class for a seriously ill colleague, a situation that confirms he’s totally unfit for dealing with adolescents filled with equal parts of phlegm and ennui. Like many other adults in Cohen’s fictive world, Gail is edgy, cynical and apathetic. She and Oren enter their affair out of lethargy rather than out of mutual attraction. Gail’s take on her life is drearily unremarkable yet filled with casual despair: “Try working for a firm that’s barely solvent, in a town that’s not too solvent either. Try coming home to a daughter who hates you, and a husband who’s been publicly humiliated and won’t go out of the house.” At first rather tightly woven, the narrative eventually fragments into luminous but loosely connected vignettes of Gail and Oren’s life in New England juxtaposed with Teddy’s doomed attempt to re-establish a meaningful relationship with Danny. Cohen has a superb ear for the rhythms of suburban speech, for the offhand nonchalance with which people dismiss each other’s dreams, and for the murky monotony of desperation.
Brilliant slices of life don’t quite cohere into a satisfying whole.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-3036-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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
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