A thoroughly absorbing and deeply moving consideration of “the strength of love” matched against “the strength of death” dominates this wonderful second novel by the author of the widely acclaimed The Sixteen Pleasures (1994). Center stage is Alan “Woody” Woodhull, a middle-aged professor of classics at a small Illinois college, whose oldest daughter “Cookie,” during a terrorist bombing of an Italian train station, is killed in 1980—a senseless loss that pulls the Woodhull family apart. Cookie’s mother Hannah leaves her husband and enters a convent. Younger siblings Sara (who narrates part of the story) and Ludi go their separate ways. And Woody, an impressively well-rounded and endearingly decent human being, seeks consolation in the ancient writers he adores, in a passionate avocation as blues guitarist and singer, and in an ill-judged tryst with a beautiful Iranian student (whose mother had formerly been his mistress). Disgraced and suspended from teaching, Woody travels in 1987 to Bologna when the terrorists responsible for Cookie’s death (as well as others—) are brought to trial, and there he achieves both a vita nuova and a greater understanding of the forces that impel some people to become cold- hearted killers, others only well-meaning adulterers. In this amazingly rich story, Woody Woodhull is shown in the context of his many “loves,” is celebrated in generously developed scenes (many during holidays: ceremonies intended to bind people together), and is examined in superb extended conversations: Woody’s Christmas visit from Hannah; a classroom discussion that makes you want to curl right up with The Odyssey; and, climactically, Woody’s meetings with the agonized father of convicted terrorist Angela Strappafelci; and then—the book’s most risky and powerful scene—with the unregenerate Angela herself in her jail cell. The primal power of family, and the limitations and blessings of the intellectual life, are unforgettably explored in a wrenching story that demonstrates precisely how “It’s not the great stories that give meaning to the little ones; it’s the other way around.— (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 21, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85026-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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