A no less bitterly puckered but a more firmly focused book than A Flag for Sunrise, the jaundiced eye here is upon Hollywood and movie-making, an atmosphere utterly (as is always the case with Stone, who is the great drug-plague chronicler of our literature) brain-blown and demoralized by cocaine. Gordon Walker is a toot-ruined screenwriter whose wife has left him, who has spent some numb weeks on stage as Lear (in Seattle); and who, at the end of his rope, gets the spectacularly bad idea of visiting the set of a movie he'd done the script for (a version of Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening), now being filmed in Mexico. It's an especially tragic idea because he's actually going to see an old love, the film's star, Lee Verger—and Lee's in no shape to handle him. She's in no shape to handle herself; her psychiatrist-husband and her children having left after a visit, Lee has decided to try to do the film while not taking her anti-psychotic medication, pills she must take if she is to keep at bay her palpable, visible-to-her demons, the "Long Friends" ("Never in her life had she seen the Long Friends so unafraid of sound or light, almost ready to join her in the greater world and make the two worlds one. Seeing them gathered around, shyly peering from between their lace-like wings, murmuring encouragement. . ."). Walker's arrival can only make her worse, make her descent steeper; and in his own cocaine-hell, he follows. Stone is at his most baroquely hyperbolic in the Walker/Lee Verger scenes. They speak a kind of oblique Scripture of the thoroughly damned, and build up together to a climactic primal scene of degradation and self-destruction, the kind of thing Stone seems usually to end his books with (not really successfully). There are bruises to some of the prose, a kind of mock-Chandler sentimentality, too: "She was always looking for the inside story. . . Maybe there was more to it, he thought. Maybe she cares." And yet Stone's genius is truly concentrated, in certain sections here, in what he does better than any other contemporary American: the ugly conversation. It's carried on almost exclusively by the various parts of the film-making crew, especially the talk of the callow, callous, amoralist director (who, though he absolutely knows better, insists on treating Lee Verger as an "halucineÉ," out to milk her madness of whatever will benefit the performance he seeks) and his retinue. They're a cast of gargoyles, the film crew, whom no other writer could probably get to talk more frighteningly, with more implicit horror. As one of them says passingly to another: "There are people at this table who can vulgarize pure light." It's one of the creepiest, most unredeemed of Hollywood novels. The central duo—Walker and Lee Verger—are a touch overblown—Lucia-like operatics, semi-innocents in the maelstrom—but the book always knows who its own "Long Friends" are: the ghouls on the set.
Pub Date: March 28, 1986
ISBN: 0679735933
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
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
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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